According to a Polish report a considerable part of all sexual abuse cases against children are committed by family members and clergymen. This confirms what we have already known: the majority of perpetrators are not strangers, but people who know the victim very well and who in certain aspects are authority figures for the victim.
And this is exactly what I’ve been blathering about for years now: the most vulnerable to abuse are children who grow up in authoritarian institutes and families. Because in these kinds of “communities” it is only the order on the surface, the peaceful façade that matters, not the opinion and happiness of the child.
And that’s why the government approach that makes a well-definable “deviant” group (paedophiles) a scapegoat for abuse against children is rotten to the core and wrong from the beginning. Also because it defines as defenders exactly those from whom the children should often be protected (family, church).
Because on the surface, perpetrators are often the very embodiments of “normality”, “traditions” and “order”. Moreover, as authority figures, they are fierce and impetuous protectors of these. And the family and church are indeed not always safety nets, but the sources of vulnerability, just like the institutes that should principally serve the protection of children left without carers.
And instead of receiving real protection from the threatening authority figures often present within the family, church and childcare institutions, children are made even more defenceless. Because those in power stubbornly refuse and hinder every effort that would expose these encapsulated institutes to the fresh, enlivening breeze of change and social control. Take for example the mild treatment of child abusers within the clergy, the silencing of victims or even the refusal of a real investigation of the events in the orphanage in Kalocsa.
No, my dear fellow countrymen, it is not the so called “LGBTQ lobby” you must protect your children from, but from the wolves in sheep’s clothing who claim to be the great protectors of children and normality. And if the government would just for a moment be really interested in the fate of children, then it would make real institutional reforms instead of stirring up public opinion against minority groups.
Translation: Barbara Bukó
