This is an amazing op-ed written by a Penn State student. I think it’s worth reading.
“Survivor of Childhood Abuse Shares His Story”
By Matt Bodenschatz
We are a campus currently overtaken by a very particular kind of crisis; with one topic dominating our discourse and coloring our atmosphere. And certain people, those with a particular vantage and voice, need to speak up — if they are ready do so.
Am I ready? Probably not. But this situation has become completely incompatible with silence. I am an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse. My trauma is decades old, and is not connected to our university except by fact of my current membership within it.
My openness will not bring down a revered public figure or shake the foundations of any institution. Its context and key figures are insidiously ordinary. My story simply involves an old man who has been dead and gone for some time now, and the consequences of where I randomly sat during the hours of a lightless, late-night summer holiday hayride.
The man that violated me, that murdered the version of me that was in progress until that one single day of my life when my path crossed his, is dead now. But though it may be hard for anyone outside of the victim/ survivor community to believe, I find that almost irrelevant.
My abuser, like the abuser of the group of young people at the center of these recent crimes, did not steal money or some other tangible thing from me that he can replace as means to restore balance and to bring about justice. Our abusers did not create conditions that can be righted by firings, trials, executions or jail terms.
They introduced unnatural acidic conditions into the ground where delicate seeds were growing. They uprooted and destroyed natural growth processes meant to be a part of a very deliberate evolution into full, rounded, healthy, personhood. They murdered developing versions of people even before they got the fair chance to exist.
Retribution alone does not fix that. Nothing fixes it — not even the death of the abuser. It’s something that becomes its own independent burden. Something that is dealt with, heavily. Not something that gets repaired.
This group that has been victimized by a man of Penn State (and then re-victimized by the repulsive inaction of other men at Penn State) has my attention, my respect and my admiration. I had one feeble, slow-moving old man to resist, to confront, to report — and I didn’t do it.
They were allegedly assaulted by a known, respected and revered man who had positioned himself as a pillar of his community — and they spoke out. I am in awe of them.
The secrecy surrounding my experiences was self-inflicted. No one knew what had happened except for me and my abuser. For them, though, the secrecy surrounding their abuse was institutionalized.
What I have been through has been awful. But I strain to sufficiently imagine what it must have been like for these current victims to know that there are adults out there who were aware of the abuse yet maintained secrecy about it. Add to that crushing knowledge, for some of them, that their abuse was witnessed directly, stumbled upon in real time by an adult who did not immediately intervene — I doubt I could carry that load without descending into hopelessness and rage.
We as a community are struggling now, having to accept that we are not separated here, despite our supposed prestige, from the realities of the human condition. We are susceptible to tragedy. And not only were some of our key figures unable to shield us from it, they are capable of being the reason why it was visited upon us at all.
And the point where we now find ourselves — mired in simple, damning phrases, voicing fragments of fury— is understandable, but it must be surpassed. These reactions must evolve, must give way to sentences. And those sentences must contribute to thoughtful paragraphs. Because we may think we understand what happened recently and why. But we don’t. Because we want to feel like our expressions of outrage, and our righteous bluster, and our acrimony toward the offenders will all, in and of themselves, accomplish something. But they won’t.
In circumstances like these, acrimony comes easy. Given the heightened state we’re now in, bluster can be harder to suppress than to voice. Knowing of the obvious horror that these boys went through, outrage is justly assumed. These reactions aren’t the end of our obligations. They are the start.
We must now ask questions of ourselves and of each other. Ugly, uncomfortable questions that have no easy answers. And we must act. Appropriately. Thoughtfully. As intelligent individuals who show themselves worthy of regard.
If we never move beyond where we are right now, stuck within a mode of strictly symbolic acts, then we have failed. Because Jerry Sandusky didn’t allegedly commit crimes against symbols. He, along with those other men who did nowhere near enough to stop him, didn’t fail an emblem, a mascot, or a cat statue found at the northwestern tip of the campus. They failed young, vulnerable, trusting, promising human beings.
Continuing on in the aftermath of that requires the capacity to bear human frailty, profound grief, and the long-term, ever-present nature of the consequences of what has happened.
You’ll graduate someday, and will eventually come to be separated from Penn State by years and by miles, and you won’t think about this tragedy very much. And even when you do, you’ll have the luxury of picking those thoughts up and then setting them back down at will.
The people on the receiving end of this abuse have no such luxury. No matter where they live, how old they get, or what they do, this is a piece of them at all times. Yes, they could possibly still have fulfilling lives. But if they do, will that be partly because of what we as a community did, or will it be fully despite what we didn’t do?
You are outraged. Angry. Feeling betrayed. Yes those reactions are far better than their opposites, better than apathy or indifference. But this isn’t about you. It’s not even about me. Until and unless you find a way to do something genuine, lasting and sincerely sympathetic for someone at the receiving end of these very real, crippling crimes in our headlines — even if you never get to meet them or to know any of their names — then your indignation is unearned and misplaced.
I know you lost a football coach. But the people that really matter in all of this are at risk of losing their core identities. They have to try to thrive despite the fear that constantly lingers just outside of anything and everything, eager to shatter any hints of peace.
As I’ve written above, if we are to achieve any real understanding of what has happened and to move forward from here, then we must ask some uncomfortable questions of each other and acknowledge some ugly truths.
I will start us off, because I have something unpopular to say. I see everywhere — in your editorials on your social media pages, in your subversively-written chalk messages printed all over campus — your desperate insistence that “We are still Penn State.”
And each of these that I come upon creates in me a feeling of isolating sadness and emptiness. It reinforces in me what I have long felt -that the realities of victims and the realities of observers are worlds apart.
Because my community — the survivor community, the victim community — doesn’t get to boast of being unchanged. If we do so, we become complicit in our own demise, because the worst thing for us to do is to pretend we weren’t uprooted.
The worst thing for us to do is pretend that we won’t miss the part of us that was violently ripped away. The worst thing for us to do is to deny that we have holes in ourselves. Holes that make us constantly, mournfully aware of what was supposed to be there. Holes that we can’t fill with blue and white, even if we wanted to.
Matt Bodenschatz, 38, is a sexual abuse survivor, current Penn State student and native of Cambria County.
