Question If you were molested and raped by several of your family members, how would you go about telling someone so you or no one else gets hurt. I don't wanna get anyone else involved but I just want it to stop.

Accepted:
April 29, 2008

Comments

The problem that you face (how to keep yourself (and perhaps others) safe) is very serious and calls for a kind of knowledge (i.e., of the resources available to you in your community) that philosophers don't have by training.

But certain constraints that you put on a solution to this problem (that no one get hurt, that no one else get involved) might rest on certain philosophical assumptions that I would like to challenge.

If we were assaulted and raped by a stranger, most of us would feel no moral confusion about what we are entitled to do. In such a situation, what the stranger did is very wrong and we have a right to protect ourselves (and others) against this harm, even if the consequences of this protection (e.g., getting the police involved) would be harm to the rapist (in the form of a jail sentence). But in cases in which we are victims of abuse at the hands of members of our own family, it can seem very difficult to figure out what is the right thing to do.

We feel that we have stronger obligations to members of our family than we have to mere strangers to protect them against harm. We also feel that we should not reveal to those outside of the family embarassing facts about other members of our family. And usually, these feelings are reliable.

Intimate relationships, like those between members of a family or those between close friends, are valuable precisely because they provide us with a source of protection that we could not expect from mere strangers. And they also provide us with a safe place to reveal to others aspects of ourselves that would be embarassing and perhaps dangerous to reveal to strangers. Yes, Uncle Bob drinks too much at Thanksgiving; yes, Dad had a tawdry affair last year; and yes, Mom has a weird poodle fetish. But we love them anyway. If we didn't have a place where we could reveal the less socially acceptable aspects of ourselves (and we all have many such aspects), with confidence that our foibles wouldn't be exposed to less sympathetic strangers, our lives would be much more lonely than they are.

Because of the significant value of intimate relations for all of us, we are right to be reluctant to reveal to strangers facts about family members that would be not only embarassing to them but could expose them to harm. The important thing to remember, though, is that these feelings of protectiveness and loyalty make sense only in the context in which the family is actually serving a valuable protective function for its members. When a family member is not serving this protective function, and especially when a family member is someone against whom one requires protection, then these feelings of protectiveness and loyalty are inappropriate (which is not to say that you won't continue to feel them even when they are no longer appropriate).

You have no more obligation to protect abusers who are members of your family from the embarassment and harm that might arise from your exposure of their abuse than you have to strangers. In other words, you have no obligation to the abuser, but you do have an obligation to yourself to protect yourself from being abused.

If you are of school age, I would suggest that you go to a trusted adult-- a teacher, a guidance counselor, a coach-- and seek his or her help to keep you safe. If you are older, call a local crisis hotline, where you can get information about how best to keep yourself safe in your community.

Question If you were molested and raped by several of your family members, how would you go about telling someone so you or no one else gets hurt. I don't wanna get anyone else involved but I just want it to stop. Accepted:April 29, 2008

Question If you were molested and raped by several of your family members, how would you go about telling someone so you or no one else gets hurt. I don't wanna get anyone else involved but I just want it to stop.

Accepted:
April 29, 2008