Long Term Effect

I am still numb, shocked and in total disbelief and I am pinching myself trying to figure out if it was a dream or was it real.

I just finished a forty-five-minute interview with the founders of www.notbychoice.org and I am still dizzy to say the least. I thought I have seen it all, I thought I have heard it all, and I was sure nothing in the world will ever shock me again, but of course I was wrong.

You are probably wondering, why am I giving them exposure? Why am I mentioning them here? Why did I even interview them? Well, you probably guessed it! These three individuals have the one thing in common. They are not the same age group, they are not from the same chassidus, they are not living in the same areas and they are not even the same type of people to be friendly with each other, but they have that one terrible thing in common, they were all abused by their Rabbi (teacher) at different years, different eras, different schools but the same bitter results.

The sadder part of it, they confined in me some statistics of their site (they did not grant me access to their members pages, as a security measure) and shared with me many details, and while many of their members are NOT victims of sexual abuse, the majority of them did have sexual abuse in some form in their childhood years.

While they didn’t want to disclose the number of members they have, they did tell me that approximately approve one out of every hundred-and-fifty applicants, which is less than one percent (0.75%)..

I am not going to judge, write or discuss any of their motives and the validity to their mission, but I will attempt to once again prove to you that every such group or everything bad in our community comes back to sexual abuse in one way or another. I have yet to meet a person in the community that has a bitter and confused  life due to the fact that his parents were poor, rich, strict, or any kind of behavior issue, but I have rarely met a person that was abused in their childhood that does not have a issue in marriage, mental problems, gambling, drug addictions or any other form of aggression and hostility.

If a smoker of twenty years decides to stop smoking, doctors will tell you that after five years his lungs have a great chance of being 80% back to previous levels, however not by sexual abuse.  The fact of the matter is that nothing in life has such a long term effect as sexual abuse. It is just a fact that can’t be denied. There have been people that were able to move on and cope with it, but its very few and far and even those that did “make” it, will often have different symptoms that hurts them in other ways.

I know an individual that has panic attacks as a result of sexual abuse. He leads a nice life (at least on the outside), has a loving family, but constantly has illusions and panic attacks and he does not know why? His job is great, his family is great, and his surrounding is great. It took him years of therapy and intense rehabilitation to find the cause of the problem and only then he was able to learn how to cope with it and manage this problem.

One would think that after all these research and findings; this would become priority number one. One would think that after so much hurt we’ve seen due to abuse, people would line up to fight this plague. One would think that in our generation and in 2011 we would be smarter than that and somehow find a way to openly discuss this issues and make a stop to it. But still every day, the public dismisses it, downplays it and ignores it. Why? Why is the biggest problem in the community ignored? Why is the proven number-one killer in a person’s life dismissed? Why is every community in the globe educating their kids and we refuse to do so? Why are we THE ONLY COOMUNITY IN THE UNIVERSE still trying to whitewash this terrible problem?

I will say it one more time! It’s the gutless rabbis that are controlling the damage-control. The same rabbis that put Rabbi Nuchem in Cheirem and hoped to quiet him down and to shut him up, the same rabbis that don’t have the guts to openely discuss this issue, the same rabbis that get sold for money – Are the same rabbis that deserve the blame and they have Jewish blood on their hands!

Keep ignoring it and keep whitewashing it and keep convincing yourself that Rabbi Nuchem is hallucinating and when you see in twenty years from now that half of our generation is gone and the other half are not mentally and physically all right, perhaps then you will wake up and smell the coffee.

It will be too late then – It’s almost too late now…….