'Keep it quiet, please'

It’s the very nature of sex crimes, of course, that the perpetrators do everything they can to keep their wrongdoing quiet. Silencing of this sort can happen on any scale. It might be the attorney for comedian Bill Cosby emphatically denying multiple women’s charges that the TV star had forced them into unwanted sexual relationships. Or perhaps it’s the government of Japan claiming there are no records of their army’s ever compelling thousands of Korean women and girls to serve as “comfort women” during World War II.

Keep it quiet, please. Very quiet.

But don’t let the fact that things seem so silent trick you into thinking nothing nasty has happened. Or may even still be happening. Remember how many years you absolutely believed in Bill Cosby. Remember that Japan kept the “comfort women” issue pretty quiet for several decades.

We might also have been stunned silent if there had been a few more truth-tellers around. We all might have collapsed in shock if either Cosby or Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had earlier surprised us by acknowledging in straightforward fashion: “Yes. Guilty as charged.”

Don’t let the fact that things seem so silent trick you into thinking nothing nasty has happened. Or may even still be happening.

But instead, perpetrators and whitewashers of sex crimes count on the fact that most of us are reluctant to talk about such things. We’re like the next-door neighbors of the Islamic terrorists in San Bernardino, Calif., who suspected something unsavory was going on, but couldn’t quite bring themselves to say so. Sex crimes are a different kind of violence—but they impose the same kind of cautious and reluctant silence on everyone close at hand.

Want to measure just how skeptical you might be? Try a brief and easy test by reading this: Reliable statistics say that 1 out of every 3 women in America has suffered some kind of unwanted sexual intrusion or offense. Similar statistics say that 1 out of every 3 men in America has an ongoing relationship with pornography.

What’s your immediate, intuitive response to those assertions? If your tendency is to say promptly and defensively, “Couldn’t be!—no way!—not in my family!—not in my church!—not in my neighborhood!” well then, might it be that you’ve already allowed yourself to fall into the “got-you-silenced” trap?

I don’t say this to scare you, or to raise inappropriate fears of evil or suspicions about people very close to you. I say it because I have come to believe the statistics as providing an accurate picture of our very sick society. I have personally witnessed the ugly astonishment that comes when someone (and especially someone in a leadership role) we all thought was trustworthy proved not to be so. I have personally experienced the sober surprise of discovering the betrayal of a colleague—a friend who was only pretending to live the pure life he suggested to those around him.

But I am specifically not encouraging you to head to church next Sunday, settle into your seat, and then—looking up and down the row of fellow worshippers—try to decide who is concealing some grievous secret.

Somehow, instead, we all need to embrace a humble balance, in which we are—at the same time—both confident in and altogether suspicious of each other. We need to start by confessing our own sins. Then, when and if someone suggests there’s activity nearby that deserves a closer look, we dare not shirk our duty, but do a faithful and diligent check.

In it all, God’s people need to keep in mind just how tricky and dangerous an assignment interpreting silence can be.

Email jbelz@wng.org

Listen to Joel Belz’s commentary on The World and Everything in It.