When Silence Becomes a System

That's really quite interesting.

And what drew me to your work is this whole idea of silence and the systems, systems that were supposed to protect victims and silence.

So when you put the systems and silence together, that's something that I had personally experienced when My daughter was in that relationship for 18 years, and over those 18 years, I tried to reach out to anybody that I could, from law enforcement officers to psychiatrists that were treating her for traumatic experience of the violence she had suffered, to the therapist.

that she was seeing that I was paying out of pocket for her to see, and still I wasn't allowed to.

For the police was, what you're telling us is hearsay.

For the doctors was, we have to protect her privacy, even though I wasn't looking for them to tell me what she told them, because God knows I knew more than any mother should know of what she had experienced.

here.

And anytime that I called the police and I just said, she came home with this injury, but she's not at a place where she can go through and report it.

Is there anything I can do? And nothing worked.

So this session, when silence becomes a system.

What do you mean by that? How does silence stop being something an individual carries, the woman that feels ashamed of what's happening to her, and start being something that institutions are running on? How does that work?

Yeah,

and

it is a continuum, as I'm sure you recognize, it's a continuum.

We as a society, due to fear, shame, embarrassment, and all of those emotions, we stop ourselves from both admitting what's going on and then talking about it.

So we hinder the education and the training and the knowledge.

that everyone needs in order to prevent, treat, and mitigate child sexual abuse and other adverse childhood experiences and all of the other related issues because they are all intertwined.

Domestic violence is intertwined with this.

Other types of violence in the home is intertwined with this.

All those factors keeping it under wraps.

But then there are other layers here.

and you mentioned the police, and then there's a social service system, and then there's the judicial system.

Given the number of people who are abused, what we know is that there are a lot of offenders, of abusers, of perpetrators out there, and they are sitting everywhere, and they are sitting on judicial benches they are sitting in the police stations they are sitting also in our school systems our coaches they are everywhere and people as a system are protecting the silence around this and related issues because either of their own predilections their own sensibilities and or are They are afraid of what society is going to say about them and their positions.

The schools are silent because they're afraid of what happens if a child starts to report.

One, are they going to be able to handle multiple reports of child sexual abuse or other kinds of abuse? Are they going to be able to handle it? Do they have the counselors? Do they have the support systems available? But it's also they're afraid of the public relations that happens around this issue.