Streisand’s Jackson comments reveal new dangers

AT THE weekend, Barbra Streisand got herself into trouble with a series of disparaging remarks about the adults who have accused the late Michael Jackson of sexually molesting them as children.

In an interview in The Times of London, Streisand said of Jackson’s accusers: “You can say ‘molested’, but those children, as you heard say, they were thrilled to be there.” Streisand went on: “They both married and they both have children, so it didn’t kill them.” The public, perhaps reeling from what it learnt from the recent documentary film Leaving Neverland, was not thrilled with Streisand’s commentary; she has since apologised.

Streisand’s comments were alarming in part because children are understood to represent a special class of victim, deserving of the strongest protection and redress. Children are credulous, children can’t defend themselves, and there is not even a possibility of a child rendering consent.

But we are entering a period in which we are going to hear more reports of childhood sexual abuse – not necessarily from children themselves but from adults who are prepared to come forward about their pasts. How we treat these victims and their claims matters. Yet, as we hear more from adult victims of childhood sex abuse, it’s already clear that the special status reserved for child victims of sex crimes is eroding.

Defenders of R Kelly have blamed his accusers for being “fast”. Some victims of abuse by Catholic priests and Protestant pastors have been cast as gold diggers.

Kids who report their abuse while still young may be protected by the special respect set aside for children, but it appears that as adults, suspicions about experience, motives and culpability will be aired. In that sense, adult victims of childhood sexual abuse can expect to be treated a lot like victims of sexual offences who were adults at the time of their abuse.

The unique dispositions of individual adults have never been a good reason to doubt otherwise credible reports of sexual abuse. Nor should they constitute a reason to doubt adults who come forward about incidents that occurred when they were children.

I have interviewed dozens of adult victims of childhood sexual abuse in my work for The Washington Post. I have found these survivors to be just as varied in their motives, attitudes and intentions as anyone else.

Some of them are angry and want to see their abusers exposed and punished; some are shy and frightened of scrutiny, and just want to forget what happened. Some want money – which is fair, not only because we use money as a means of settling accounts in civil law but also because survivors of sexual abuse need money to cover health expenses, therapy and other costs associated with lifelong trauma. Some of them don’t mind the fame that comes with highly publicised accounts of abuse, which can be refreshing after many years of secrecy; others want nothing to do with the media.

And none of those motives and explanations has any bearing on whether their allegations are credible.

We have a chance to redress old wrongs and build a culture that is, overall, more capable of rendering justice. Whether that promise pans out will have a great deal to do with whether we can reverse the attitudes that have made reporting these crimes difficult from the beginning. We might as well start now. |