A is bad. B is worse.” How dare you defend A?

Anon: epitome of several Twitter attacks.

See end of article for Polish translation

In my memoir, An Appetite for Wonder, I wrote the following, about an incident at boarding school.

I would watch games of squash from the gallery, waiting for the game to end so I could slip down and practise by myself. One day – I must have been about eleven – there was a master in the gallery with me. He pulled me onto his knee and put his hand inside my shorts. He did no more than have a little feel, but it was extremely disagreeable (the cremasteric reflex is not painful, but in a skin-crawling, creepy way it is almost worse than painful) as well as embarrassing. As soon as I could wriggle off his lap, I ran to tell my friends, many of whom had had the same experience with him. I don’t think he did any of us any lasting damage, but some years later he killed himself.

This paragraph, together with a subsequent statement to the Times that I would not judge that teacher by the standards of today, has been heavily criticised. These criticisms represent a misunderstanding, which I would like to clear up.

The standards of today are conditioned by our increasing familiarity with the traumatising effect that pedophile abuse can have on children, sometimes scarring them psychologically for life. Today we read, almost daily, of adults whose childhood was blighted by an uncle perhaps, or even a parent, who would day after day, week after week, year after year, sexually abuse a vulnerable child. The child would often have no escape, would not be believed if he/she told the other parent, or told a teacher. In many cases it is only now, when the abused children have reached adulthood, that these stories are coming out. To make light of their stories, even after all these years, might in some cases re-awaken the trauma of not being believed at the time when it was all happening, and when being believed would have meant so much to the child.

Only slightly less culpable than the abusers themselves are the institutions that protected them, of which the most prominent examples are to be found in the senior hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. This is why I personally donated £10,000 of my own money towards a fund, instigated by Christopher Hitchens and me, to build the legal case for prosecuting Pope Benedict XVI for his part (when Cardinal Ratzinger) in covering up sexual abuse of children by priests. Our initiative, for which I paid 50%, the rest being raised by Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, resulted in the book The Case of the Pope: Vatican accountability for human rights abuse, in which the distinguished barrister Geoffrey Robertson QC laid out the case for the prosecution should any jurisdiction in the world choose to take it up in the future.

Now, given the terrible, persistent and recurrent traumas suffered by other people when abused as children, week after week, year after year, what should I have said about my own thirty seconds of nastiness back in the 1950s? Should I have lied and said it was the worst thing that ever happened to me? Should I have mendaciously sought the sympathy due to a victim who had truly been damaged for the rest of his life? Should I have named the offending teacher and called down posthumous disgrace upon his head?

No, no and no. To have done so would have been to belittle and insult those many people whose lives really were blighted and cursed, perhaps by year-upon-year of abuse by a father or other person who was deeply important in their life. To have done so would have invited the justifiably indignant response: “How dare you make a fuss about the mere half minute of gagging unpleasantness that happened to you only once, and where the perpetrator was not your own father but a teacher who meant nothing special to you in your life. Stop playing the victim. Stop trying to upstage those who really were tragic victims in their own situations. Don’t cry wolf about your own bad experience, because it undermines those whose experience was – and remains – so much worse.”

That is why I made light of my own bad experience. To excuse pedophiliac assaults in general, or to make light of the horrific experiences of others, was a thousand miles from my intention.

I should have hoped that much was obvious. But I was perhaps presumptuous in the last sentence of the paragraph quoted above. I cannot know for certain that my companions’ experiences with the same teacher were are brief as mine, and theirs may have been recurrent where mine was not. That’s why I said only “I don’t think he did any of us lasting damage”. We discussed it among ourselves on many occasions, especially after his suicide, and there was indeed general agreement that his gassing himself was far more upsetting than his sexual depredations had been. If I am wrong about any particular individual; if any of my companions really was traumatised by the abuse long after it happened; if, perhaps it happened many times and amounted to more than the single disagreeable but brief fondling that I endured, I apologise.

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Wykorzystywanie seksualne dzieci i nieporozumienia wokół moich wspomnień Autor tekstu: Richard Dawkins



Tłumaczenie: Małgorzata Koraszewska „A jest zły. B jest gorszy". Jak śmiesz bronić A?

Anonim: streszczenie wielu ataków na Twitterze. W moich wspomnieniach, An Appetite for Wonder, napisałem następujący akapit o incydencie w szkole z internatem: Z galerii obserwowałem gry w squasha, czekając, by gra się skończyła, żebym mógł zejść na dół i samemu poćwiczyć. Pewnego dnia — musiałem mieć około jedenastu lat — na galerii był razem ze mną jeden z nauczycieli. Posadził mnie sobie na kolanach i włożył rękę w moje szorty. Nie zrobił niczego więcej, ale było to skrajnie nieprzyjemne (odruch mosznowy nie jest bolesny, ale w przyprawiający o gęsią skórkę i odrażający sposób jest to niemal gorsze niż ból), jak również zawstydzające. Gdy tylko udało mi się uciec z jego kolan, pobiegłem powiedzieć o tym przyjaciołom, z których wielu miało z nim takie same doświadczenia. Nie sądzę, by którykolwiek z nas doznał trwałych szkód, a kilka lat później ten nauczyciel popełnił samobójstwo. Ten akapit wraz z późniejszą wypowiedzią dla „Timesa" gdzie dodałem, że nie sądziłbym tego nauczyciela według dzisiejszych standardów, był ostro krytykowany. Pojawiło się tu wiele nieporozumień, które chciałbym wyjaśnić. Standardy dzisiejsze są uwarunkowane coraz lepszą znajomością traumatycznych skutków, jakie wykorzystanie seksualne może mieć na dzieci, pozostawiając czasami rany psychiczne na całe życie. Dzisiaj czytamy niemal codziennie o dorosłych, których dzieciństwo zostało zniszczone przez wujka a czasem nawet rodzica, dzień za dniem, tydzień za tygodniem, rok po roku wykorzystujących seksualnie bezbronne dziecko. Dziecko często nie ma żadnej ucieczki, nie wierzono by mu, gdyby powiedziało drugiemu z rodziców lub nauczycielowi. W wielu wypadkach dopiero teraz, kiedy wykorzystywane dzieci dorosły, te historie wychodzą na światło dzienne. Lekceważenie ich opowieści, nawet po tych wszystkich latach, może w niektórych wypadkach na nowo obudzić traumę tego, że nie dawało się im wiary w czasie, kiedy działo się to wszystko i kiedy uwierzenie dziecku tak wiele by dla niego znaczyło. Tylko nieco mniej winne niż sami zwyrodnialcy są instytucje, które ich chroniły, a z których najbardziej znane przykłady znajdują się na szczytach hierarchii Kościoła rzymsko-katolickiego. Dlatego sam dałem 10 tysięcy funtów na fundusz założony przez Christophera Hitchensa i przeze mnie, by złożyć oskarżenie przeciwko papieżowi Benedyktowi XVI za jego udział (kiedy był kardynałem Ratzingerem) w ukrywaniu wykorzystywania seksualnego dzieci przez księży. Z tej inicjatywy, której koszty pokryłem w 50%, a resztę zebrali Christopher Hitchens i Sam Harris, powstała książka The Case of the Pope: Vatican accountability for human rights abuse, w której wybitny prawnik Geoffrey Robertson QC przedstawił dowody oskarżenia, gotowe, gdyby jakiś sąd na świecie chciał podjąć to w przyszłości. . . . Czytaj dalej

Written By: Richard Dawkins continue to source article at