We Must Have No Tolerance for Sexual Abuse and Violence

We must stop sexual abuse and violence. We must take the conversation out of the cloak rooms of churches, governments, schools and homes, and raise our voices until the end of sexual abuse and violence is shouted out in every discussion we have as a global community.

My father and I discussed this today. I asked him what he thought of the allegations of sexual abuse among the clergy. He thought this behavior has probably gone on for centuries. Why would the church be different than the rest of the world?

I think so, too, and I am ill to think it. We are not discussing isolated incidences, long ago and since ended, in faraway places concerning people we don't know. We all know someone who has been sexually abused, not just in the holiest of sanctuaries where a child parishioner must feel completely safe, or never understand safety again.

We especially turn a blind eye to suspicions of experiences that we ourselves have had, and buried the memory.

I am praying tonight for the thousands and thousands and children who have experienced what must never be experienced, who have been silenced and afraid, and pray there is someone in their world to talk to, with whom they can learn not to always feel alone and wrong; and I am weeping for the perpetrators who must be exposed and stopped. But stopped they must be.