Most people are silent on abuse until it has impacted them

The fact is, for most people, there is complicity for abuse, until it directly impacts their life or those they love.  Then they speak up.  It’s then that they develop a view.  It’s then that they suddenly ‘see’, having seen all along.

Many issues in life are like this.  Nobody has the empathy to care much for those who face loss until they, themselves, have had their own lives completely re-channelled through grief.  Special needs in children are hard to see until you’ve had a child with autism, diabetes, a disorder or another syndrome, and the parents’ horrendously challenging daily journey doesn’t rate a mention.  Few bother much for depression or suicide or anxiety until they are met by that ferocity of these situations.  Abuse of children doesn’t tend to bother us until we imagine being that child.  The throes of pain attain a reframing of care.

Pain wakes us up from our slumber.  When we’ve experienced abuse, we begin to see how many victims there are, how many people are met with silence, who are ignored and uncatered for, who have even been maligned very severely in some cases.  When we’ve seen a loved one suffer abuse that is completely not their fault, and we see them hope beyond hope for it to stop, month after month, year after year, and it never stops, and we see their hope falter and fail, we see the devastating effects of abuse first hand.

Humanity is afflicted with a condition that fails to care unless failures are experienced, and then there can only be the response to care.

One of the hardest things to bear is having been abused and not believed, or worse, seen as the one at fault for the abuse that has been exacted out against you.

Why is that we don’t take a person’s perception of their experience as valid?  Why is it that we hear their story and the jury’s still out?  Why is it that we need to have experienced the truth of that pain they’ve gone through for that pain to register in us?  Why is it that so many people, and yes, people with influence a lot of the time, nod in agreement, yet still remain passive, ambivalent... silent, no less.

I’ve known so many people who have literally had their lives changed through a single event that completely changed their perspective.  It’s as if it was one life then, another life now.  God can and does change our perspective through events that impact our lives, our children’s and our grandchildren’s lives, and our parents’ lives.

One thing that this truth challenges is the one of perspective: to value another human being’s perception as their truth, valid in and of itself.  What a cherished thing it is to believe a person their experience, or to be the one who is believed.

Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash