Panel Advises Israel Set Up Child Protection Authority After Sexual Abuse Testimonies
Victims of child abuse refrained from seeking help from Israel's health care system, education system or courts, due to negative experiences with the authorities, hundreds of testimonies reveal
A public committee tasked with examining Israeli policy on dealing with child sexual assault has recommended establishing an inter-ministerial authority for the protection of children, after a report showed that current Israeli policy often fails victims of child sex abuse, sometimes even compounding the victims' trauma.
In a report submitted to Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Monday, the committee also recommended setting clear policy for the Israeli health system when it comes to treating victims of trauma, as well as providing special training to all government ministry staff who deal with such services. The panel also advised that children who are victims of sexual assault receive government financial compensation, including possible regular restitution payments.
These recommendations were based on testimony from more than 500 child victims of sexual assault – all of whom are now adults – which highlighted the problematic nature of Israel's current policy, the committee members said. The committee was jointly established in 2020 by Tel Aviv University and the Jerusalem-based Haruv Institute, which deals with child abuse and neglect, with the goal of completely overhauling Israel’s policies in dealing with child victims of sexual assault.
The report included evidence that the system has compounded the trauma that the victims suffered from their attackers. According to testimonies, some victims refrained from seeking help from the health care system, the education system or the courts due to past negative experiences with the authorities, or due to experiences that they had heard about from other victims.
When victims refrain from getting help from the authorities, it has serious consequences for both the victim and the prosecution of the assailant, committee members said. The report showed that in only 41 percent of cases was abuse uncovered while the victims were still children—and, within those cases, only half of the children who spoke up about the abuse were referred to the government for assistance.
About 80 percent of the victims said they had not received any assistance from social welfare or law enforcement authorities. “The process of giving testimony and being confronted by my attacker was a harmful process,” one victim told the panel. “They didn’t take me into account and didn’t see me, the victim. Instead, they used me as a witness in the case.”
Roughly a third said they experienced financial difficulties as adults as a result of their childhood experiences, either due to the challenges of functioning on the job, or because of the heavy cost of psychological treatment. Eleven percent said that they subsist on government disability payments alone.
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“Israeli society needs to change the discourse. [It’s not] the child who needs to be ashamed. The one who needs to be ashamed is the one who harmed them,” the committee’s chairwoman, retired Judge Nava Ben-Or said. The panel was established at the initiative of Prof. Carmit Katz of Tel Aviv University’s Shapell School of Social Work.
Among those who gave testimony, more than 70 percent had suffered ongoing abuse. In a quarter of the cases, the sexual abuse began when the victim was younger than 5, while the average age was 8. And in a clear majority of cases, the perpetrator was someone whom the child knew: In half the cases, the abuser was a close relative or a member of the child’s extended family.
Regarding the alleged inadequacies in Israel's health care system, adults who suffered abuse while children said that health workers treated them insensitively, labelling them as psychiatric patients while ignoring their traumatic pasts. Much of their treatment involved prescribing tranquilizers, which were not appropriate for their condition, they said.
The panel highlighted what it believed was the importance of an inter-ministerial authority to coordinate the entire government’s response to the problem, to bring about improvements and to ensure that victims don’t “fall through the cracks.”
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https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/12/coronavirus-orthodox-brooklyn-blima-marcus-emes.html
For EMES, spring 2019’s measles outbreak was a harbinger of things to come. Back then, Abramson worked closely with Marcus to battle “overwhelming fear & misinformation” about the MMR vaccine. “As someone constantly preaching about the danger of the measles virus, I became a target for misdirected anger,” said Abramson. A fellow parent at her son’s local yeshiva threatened to sue her for insisting vaccinations be mandatory for all students, she recalled.
Now, Abramson says, the community’s reaction is far more intense & antagonistic than it was during the measles outbreak.
“People say wild things to me, on the phone, in the grocery store. People accuse me of Nazi tactics to make people stay isolated in their home,” she said.
A prominent community doctor whom I initially planned to interview for this article eventually declined to talk to me; after publicly decrying his community’s lax response to COVID safety measures for months, he is no longer speaking to the media, a source close to him told me, because the “personal fallout” this doctor experienced for chastising his fellow community members has been “severe.” (Within the Orthodox community, there are several ways community leaders quash dissent. One particularly effective method is to threaten a person’s marriage prospects — or the prospects of that person’s children or grandchildren. The threat of poisoned matchmaking prospects, or “shidduchim,” can quickly muzzle those who might otherwise be compelled to speak out on issues from child sexual abuse to COVID safety.)
Since those lockdowns, several Jewish news outlets indicated that Orthodox community officials are actively discouraging members from testing their children for COVID to avoid further school shutdowns.
“I love my landsmen, but I'll never ever understand them,” she posted on Facebook 2 weeks ago, after a young mother in her community died from COVID. Even as the community reeled from the enormity of the loss, Marcus says she continues to face ridicule for wearing a mask.
The last time we talked, Marcus was weary but still at it. She is in touch with other members of the EMES task force every day, orchestrating Yiddish robocalls to encourage masks. She reached out to certain city health officials who were particularly helpful during the measles crisis, people who'd been proactive in asking for her thoughts on culturally sensitive ways to approach the ultra-Orthodox community. This time around, though, she says those same officials have been largely unresponsive to her messages.
As winter encroaches, Marcus and EMES are fighting several battles at once. They want more financial support from the city and state to fight misinformation. They want more support from leaders within their own community. They desperately want to find a way to convince the men and women they pray with, whose children they send their own children to school with, to take COVID seriously, and not take a guy like Heshy Tischler seriously at all. But with the trauma of the first surge, the city’s bungled response, the political climate, and an entrenched distrust of secular restrictions, many of the people they are trying to influence now feel beyond their reach.
“I can’t go on living in fear,” a young Orthodox woman who lost her father-in-law to COVID recently told me, explaining that she tested positive for COVID antibodies and therefore thinks she's inoculated against reinfection. She's not interested in wearing a mask or taking other precautions, and she believes that Hashem has a plan. “Not everything's in our control. Hashem has something to do with it.”
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