The abuse of
children is a raw wound in our society, and there is an increasing
honesty about its true pervasiveness.
A few years ago
attention was focused on the Catholic Church, and while it takes
nothing from the Church's very real failings, we are now ever more
aware that as an institution it was far from alone.
But nor was, or is,
abuse confined to institutions – much, perhaps most, abuse takes
place in the context of the family. And it is one such story that
this book recounts.
The author's preface
clearly wrestles with the issue of telling a “true story”. I
have reflected a few times before about this of struggle or interplay
around what we mean by “true”. But what is clear reading this
story is its authenticity, and that power overrides any question
about whether any particular detail is “factually accurate”.
You are taken on a
journey with Rose, a dark and lonely journey, once I started to read
I found it difficult to put the book down, it felt like an act of
disrespect – knowing it is the turning away, the failing to see,
that creates the space for abuse, so the book demands that you are
attentive to it, to Rose's story.
It is a deeply
painful read, in part because there is a cruel inevitability to the
events, it is very hard to see a moment when an alternative action
would have avoided the outcome.
I think we need to
be honest about the limitations of many of our current strategies to
counter potential abuse – that is not to say those strategies
should be abandoned. We do however need to ensure that we continue
to have honest, and uncomfortable, conversations, that we never tell
ourselves “it can't happen here”, because such complacency is an
open door.
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