Could I abuse someone? This is a question I have repeatedly asked myself recently after reading the voluminous blogs on this site about abuse and its many grotesque manifestations: child abuse, rape and violence against women, to name a few. As someone who has been physically and mentally abused, it is not an easy question for me to answer. I will try though. First, I would like to consider the broad nature of abuse, and I’ll start at home.
South Africa’s black majority was, individually and collectively, the victims of the daily abuse meted out by the apartheid government. You don’t need another pale face to recount these evil crimes. Our father, Nelson Mandela, taught us how to break its deadly cycle: he concluded that ultimate freedom from abuse can only be accomplished by liberating the abuser as well as the abused. If this sounds a touch divine, The Lion paid the ultimate sacrifice. He spent 27 years in prison in defiance of apartheid. Just as no one can give all those seemingly lost years back to him, no one can ignore or forget the inherent significance of such a sacrifice. It was the proverbial last straw that broke the back of the National Party’s hegemony. Enkosi Tata Madiba. We can only repay you by trying to emulate you.
As an aside here, I find it repugnant that a certain prominent former Conservative Party politician — who, to this day, still defends some aspects of apartheid and his fellow right-wing travellers — is even allowed to serve in our democratic parliament. To them I say a poisoned tree cannot bear clementines. Would a former Nazi have been allowed to serve in Konrad Adenauer’s Bundestag or a former anti-Semitic be allowed to sit in Israel’s Knesset? All I can say is that many South Africans must be more generous-spirited than me. Post-apartheid South Africa today is afflicted by violence against women and children. As Charlene Smith famously said: “Laws don’t walk with us in the streets, or guard us in our homes, where 65% of South African women will get raped, and one in six will get murdered.” South Africa has the world’s highest rate of rape, and the most violent, according to Interpol. Sexual assault figures have climbed steadily since democracy. I don’t need to do a dot-to-dot exercise to make the connection that at least some of these patterns of abuse were spawned by the cancerous citrus tree in the apartheid era.
Looking further away the world’s attention in the last few weeks has been drawn to the Polanski case. The reaction has been fascinating, disturbing and yet, strangely hopeful, in equal measure. The Polanski affair, the editor of a Catholic weekly publication suggests, helps us understand better the loyal reactions by many of those who knew abusive priests (I was struck by how many people commented on this when I recently wrote about Roman Catholicism). Just as Polanski’s supporters cannot square his wicked behaviour with the man they know, so did the friends of abusive priests fail to associate the men they knew as good pastors with the depravity of their actions
“The Polanski case,” this editor avers, “reminds us of a truth that is not always being applied to clerical abusers: those who commit monstrous acts are not always monsters. Humanity is more complicated than that. Polanski is a gifted artist with attractive and unattractive traits who has known deep sorrow and doubtless great joy in his life. It is because people know him as a human being that he attracts empathy, misplaced though this may be in this case”.
“This cannot, however, minimise the gravity of sexual abuse. Any coercive sexual act, especially when committed against minors by persons with authority, is indefensible, whether it is rape or inappropriate fondling. The publicity and memory of the victim must have a damaging effect on her and her family. And this is the key: Polanski did not only abuse this person physically. Sexual abuse leaves lasting emotional scars; the abuse can last a lifetime.”
He also subscribes to the view expressed regularly on Thought Leader that “there can be little sympathy — and no moral relativism — for one who inflicts such scars upon others”.
The aforementioned editor, for me, however, inadvertently opens up a far deeper and more controversial question: “Who loves the abuser?” Abusers are “flesh and blood” human beings that universal research implies were, more often than not, victims of abuse themselves. Society understandably screams: “Lock the bastards up!” “Castrate the molesters!” This is true even in Catholic circles. But what about that great Christian commission of love and forgiveness, even for our enemies and for those who persecute and hurt us? This is, for me, one of the most difficult aspects of the Christian message, one I have struggled with before and still struggle with even now. However, if we look at the fruits of such an attitude we are often left astounded. Perhaps the one who was to pay the ultimate sacrifice with his life understood, as did the great Madiba, that when we cling onto hatred, bitterness and resentment we give these things tremendous power over us in our lives. In the end, we become hate-filled, bitter and resentful people.
Thankfully, though, the opposite is also true. When we strive for integration in our lives by letting go of things and situations that were painful and harmful to us, we learn to embrace and cling onto love, forgiveness and reconciliation, and so we become loving, forgiving and reconciling people. How different would have been the history of our young democracy if Madiba had not learnt this lesson. I am pretty sure that it would have been a history written in blood. Ultimately, I guess that each of us has to walk the precarious tight-rope of learning to love and forgive the sinner, while rejecting and abhorring the sin. It is in the light of this that I would like to briefly touch upon my experience of abuse. As a rule of thumb, I try not to write on subjects which I have little knowledge or experience of.
I asked at the beginning: could I abuse someone? I don’t think so. Yet there is something that troubles me and makes my eyes water as I recount this. I love Labrador dogs for a particular reason. My father served in the armed forces and, for a time, we were stationed in some God-forsaken village in northern Germany. My mother abused me physically and mentally from when I was about eight years old. She would often beat me repeatedly with a baking rolling-pin, pull my hair and stuff cotton wool buds down my ears until they bled. She also loved repeatedly playing a dice game called Yahtzee which involved five dice. If the dice hit the living room marble table too hard, which I painfully knelt next to, this might warrant a beating. So one learnt how to tilt the cup just so and to conspire that my mother always won (a warning here: it in is such experiences that the habits of a lifetime become ingrained as I recently found in a broken love affair). She would also, when my father was away, make me stand up outside her room with soap in my mouth into the early hours of the morning. There was the verbal abuse too, but this detour is not about Carol.
Happily, it came to pass that our neighbours Mick and Maureen went on holiday, leaving in our care their black Labrador, Sam. Well Sam, for this boy, was as welcome as spring flowers in late winter. We went for long walks, hence escaping my mother, and, of course, I had a bit of company on those nights I stood outside my mother’s room. Then Sam went home. On the night of Sam’s departure, I hallucinated. I stroked my imaginary friend before my hand plunged through thin air. Filled with disappointment I glanced at the video recorder’s luminous clock in the living room. At that moment, I felt this incredible sense of warmth envelope me. Catholics speak of such experiences as being moments of consolation. Others would just say that kids often have a wonderful knack of coping. You decide. Anyway, I curled up on the floor feeling comforted, only to be violently woken up soon after by my mother.
Let me just make one other frequently mentioned observation en passant about abuse. I can still remember the heart-stopping fear I felt when Mr Baldridge, my school teacher, asked how I got my multiple blue and green bruises (in a time when school teachers were allowed to get into swimming pools with children). I feared that my mother would be found out. I can still see Mr Baldridge’s anxious face when he asked me if everything was okay at home as I climbed onto the bus at home time. And I don’t think I felt any love towards my mother. So often the abuser’s reflex reaction is to protect the abuser.
Times passes, and heals — maybe. Many years later, in 2001, I was living happily in my first-ever house in Durban, a Victorian bungalow, with a large garden bordered by, with this Englishman’s quirkiness, rosebushes. And I decided that this rite of passage demanded a Labrador too. Harry, when we went to the breeder, chose us. He was twice as big as his siblings and four times as cute. I do not need to tell any dog owner who might be reading this of the joy that Harry brought to our home. And, naturally, he was a weekly visitor for a shampoo and grooming at the parlour and a frequent guest of Paws for Thought. But something dark intruded one winter’s evening. My beloved grandfather’s sudden death in May of that year left me numb, and when I was walking Harry, I suddenly felt full of rage. To my eternal shame, I struck him hard repeatedly. Until a brave domestic worker stopped me.
My point is that I have never struck a person, but I did strike a much-loved animal. It makes me wonder if the potential to abuse lies latent in all of us. I think it does. As for my mother, “now that I am a man, I have put away the things of a child”. My mother, in keeping with the statistical curve, was abused as a little girl herself and also like me, I understand, went to live in a children’s home. The crisp question is where do we, as a society and as individuals, make the pinpoint intervention? Where and when do we strike the decisive blow against the ugly hairline crack of abuse that scars our society? Is prevention not, to use the well-worn cliché, better than cure?
I apologise if the following sounds like the ruminations of a pop psychologist, but I have a sneaking feeling that patterns of abuse creep in almost unnoticed. Does abuse take root, I wonder, when we deliberately withhold affection from those we love? Why do we sometimes withhold a little word of praise from our children when it is deserved and it costs nothing to give? Why do we sometimes pace our response to SMSs from our lovers, friends and family? To make them sweat a little; to let them question if the relationship is secure? If this is where abuse sometimes begins, I have done it. Have you? In a person with a fragile makeup, it is not to hard to see how such apparently random and isolated incidents of abuse — or neglect — can lead to children and young adults growing up to become abusers.
Yes, I believe evil has an intrinsic property and that, alas, a few people’s natures are essentially evil. But, on the whole, I agree with Desmond Tutu’s belief that people are made for goodness. Maybe today, you might give a thought to the abuser. Who loves the abuser?
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