Unbearable

It’s not about sex. Sex abuse and rape are always about asserting power and dominance and control. (H/T)

And it is always evil.

Today, despite his hospital treatment, Jean Paul still bleeds when he walks. Like many victims, the wounds are such that he’s supposed to restrict his diet to soft foods such as bananas, which are expensive, and Jean Paul can only afford maize and millet. His brother keeps asking what’s wrong with him. “I don’t want to tell him,” says Jean Paul. “I fear he will say: ‘Now, my brother is not a man.'”

It is for this reason that both perpetrator and victim enter a conspiracy of silence and why male survivors often find, once their story is discovered, that they lose the support and comfort of those around them. In the patriarchal societies found in many developing countries, gender roles are strictly defined.

“In Africa no man is allowed to be vulnerable,” says RLP’s gender officer Salome Atim. “You have to be masculine, strong. You should never break down or cry. A man must be a leader and provide for the whole family. When he fails to reach that set standard, society perceives that there is something wrong.”

Often, she says, wives who discover their husbands have been raped decide to leave them. “They ask me: ‘So now how am I going to live with him? As what? Is this still a husband? Is it a wife?’ They ask, ‘If he can be raped, who is protecting me?’ There’s one family I have been working closely with in which the husband has been raped twice. When his wife discovered this, she went home, packed her belongings, picked up their child and left. Of course that brought down this man’s heart.”

Read the rest, if you can bear it.

When I made my First Holy Communion, I recall Sister telling us that our prayer, upon reception, could be about our own concerns, but the most powerful prayer at that moment would be the one we offered for “the whole world,” and its suffering. “Make Jesus welcome, and then beg for the whole world.” I can still hear her saying it.

There is so much suffering, it feels like there can never be enough prayer; so much sin there can never be enough penance. All we can do is plunge ourselves into God’s wide mercy and beg for all of humanity.