This time, I’d like to concentrate on the answer “The Ethicist” gave to a question more than the question itself. Prof. Appiah was asked by a woman (or man) who had been sexually molested by his (or her) father whether it was time to finally inform family members about the abuse, now that this son or daughter has decided to cease contact with the father for other reasons as well as the obvious one. He or she says the mother and siblings think the decision to cut off Dad is cruel, and that the father should have a chance to make amends—but they don’t know the whole story.
“If I were to share these details with my mother, I’d risk destroying a decades-long marriage in a single conversation,” the inquirer writes. “If I were to tell my siblings, I’d do irrevocable damage to their relationship with our father. Should I continue my silence to protect the rest of my family from emotional harm? Or do I owe it to them to tell them the truth? As I write this, I’m also painfully aware that if I break my silence, he will try to manipulate them into believing that none of this is true, that I’m delusional — he has done it successfully before.”
I’m not a nuanced kind of person regarding situations like this. My reaction: The truth shall set you free. Would I want to know if my spouse or father was a monster? Absolutely. That the information would be painful doesn’t mean I’d rather live in contrived ignorance. The writer has no obligation to protect his father, and it’s not protecting the mother or siblings to enable a lie.
Here’s the philosophy professor’s answer, in a few bite-size chunks:
“Now, an immediate issue is whether your father could be in a position to repeat his crimes with other children — that there aren’t others suffering in silence. If that’s the case, staying silent isn’t an option. You don’t raise this as a concern, but you need to be confident that it isn’t one.”
And how exactly could that confidence be justified? It can’t be. The writer has already stated that this man has managed to fool his entire family for decades. The rest of “The Ethicist’s” answer is superflous: “staying silent isn’t an option.” A man who molested his own child isn’t trustworthy, and never can be.
Suppose you told him that you’ll keep quiet if he tells the family that he accepts that you don’t want to see him owing to a serious wrong he did to you. The problem is that questions would arise about the nature of that wrong, and that he may not be willing to deal with them. Nor is it obvious that keeping the details vague would leave your parents’ relationship intact. Besides, your father doesn’t sound like the sort of person who could be talked into taking responsibility.
Never mind that: bargaining with the damaging information comes to close to extortion for my ethics alarms.
Even if you reveal the truth, he may be confident, rightly or wrongly, that he can get people to believe you’re not to be trusted.
So what? Don’t be a weenie. Tell the truth, and if the family chooses to believe the abuser, that’s their problem, and their tragedy.
Whatever you decide, though, you shouldn’t be motivated by the thought that you owe this truth to anyone. It’s not that there isn’t reason to care that they know the truth. Many people in your family have relationships predicated on ignorance. They might even feel, were it to come out, that you should have told them before, precisely because we want to live a life in which our important relationships are not based on a failure to understand what our intimates are like.
Yet these reasons to disclose what happened don’t impose a duty on you of doing so. You may judge that they are outweighed by the fact that sharing the truth will cause pain and disruption to many lives without doing enough compensating good. Nor are you obliged to subject yourself to the pain and disruption that your father’s manipulations may bring you.
I disagree completely. There is no duty owed to the father to keep the ugly truth from the family, but the family has a right to know.
“Which brings me to my final thought: Taking measures to protect your well-being isn’t selfish when you are, objectively, the wronged and wounded party. Will your well-being be best protected by your admittedly painful policy of steering clear of both your father and the tumult of disclosure?…”
“It’s OK to be a coward if that’s the easiest path for you.” Again, I disagree.
The last point I have to make is that I doubt very much that the mother doesn’t know about the abuse. Spouses of child-abusing parents almost always either know or are in denial.
Ethics Alarms 
“If I were to share these details with my mother, I’d risk destroying a decades-long marriage in a single conversation… If I were to tell my siblings, I’d do irrevocable damage to their relationship with our father. “
Hmm. There is NO way that this “decades-long marriage” was a healthy one. And the siblings’ relationship with their father is also a farce. The man is a child-abuser, which automatically makes him a lousy human being who is no doubt a lousy husband and a lousy father who very probably abused some or all of the children.
That said, it seems as though the rest of the family is probably in denial or terrified of this man. The odds of them believing the truth are slim, IMNSHO.
This woman is most likely, verging on certainly, not the only victim in the family. The father should be thrown in jail.
See my story “The Flyboy’s Daughter” in my collection of stories, “Stories from Way Out West,” by Bill Fearnow. Available on Amazon in print or digital. Familial child abuse is the worst, and multigenerational.
I immediately thought of your story when I read Jack’s post, OB.
The reality of a family rejecting the abused party, rather than the abuser, is unfortunately common enough that it is an enormous risk to speak out about abuse. Speaking out divides a family even if the abuser admits to what he did. There will be family members that hate the abused party for tearing the family apart, that will accuse the abused party of doing something far worse to the family than the abuse she suffered. But people who abuse others must be called out. A family living a lie will suffer from the bewildering undercurrents of hatred, mistrust, resent, even self-harm that comes from keeping the abuse a secret. And it is absolutely necessary to call out an abuser swiftly, because it may be what is needed to keep the abuse from getting worse or happening to another.
Thanks Ryan. I could not have articulated it nearly as well myself. Manna from heaven for a writer. I couldn’t more than skim a bit of Jack’s essay. Too painful. And thank you for buying and reading the book and commenting upon it. Absolute manna from heaven for a writer
Last night I was revisiting another theme in the story: the incredible toll the United States’ extraordinary effort to win World War Two took personally upon the guys who actually accomplished it. The father (who is NOT the molester, but his marriage is destroyed by his wife’s protecting her brother the molester) was an aerial combat ace in the South Pacific, a brilliant, self-taught engineer and an accomplished athlete. He likely suffered from PTSD and may have been clinically depressed or bi-polar, which was passed on to his daughter. All of which made him indispensable for a country mounting a successful war effort but impacted his life in an untold number of ways. Which is something Jack often visits in remembering and honoring his father.
Probably my favorite, most admired client from my lawyer days was a retired family dentist who’d been a non-commissioned B-17 pilot at some ridiculously young age, eighteen as I recall if that’s even possible. But certainly, in his early twenties. He’d been taken advantage of by some sharp dealers into selling some commercial raw land for a ridiculously low price. His wife hadn’t signed so we could probably have gotten him out of the deal, but the tussle was upsetting his wife, so he just let the deal go. He didn’t want her upset. He was so appreciative and genuine. As soon as he’d get my bill, he’d jump in his car and drive down to my office and give the receptionist a check. Just a great guy. I can’t imagine the terror he endured as a young man and then calmly used the GI Bill to go to college and dental school and bacame a pillar of the community.
“The last point I have to make is that I doubt very much that the mother doesn’t know about the abuse. Spouses of child-abusing parents almost always either know or are in denial.”
I’m going to call BS on this. My grandfather sexually abused my mother for the better part of two decades, moving on to force sex on her regularly when she was about 12. My mom’s abuse started when she was young enough that she did not recognize, much less stop the abuse until she was in her mid-twenties and had finally the courage to stand up for herself. My grandmother had NO idea. I have spoken to my grandmother about this issue several times and she has maintained that this came out of left field. My grandmother is not the kind of woman who minces words to make her feel good about herself or look good in my eyes. She freely admits all kinds of things that she probably shouldn’t have told her teenage granddaughter (I think her candor about certain things at the ages she told them to me verged on or perhaps sprinted across the line of unethical). The one thing that she has declared, firmly, over the years is that she never knew anything was going on between my grandfather and her fourth child.
This admission of my mother nearly destroyed our family. Of the four surviving children, my uncle never said anything to my mom and just completely cut off contact with my grandfather. My aunts however, said many awful things to my mom and, nearly four decades later, there is still a great deal of difficulty in my family due to this. My grandmother refused to believe my mom for about five years, when she finally accepted it and divorced my grandfather. My grandfather never denied that this happened, but argued that it was my grandmother’s fault exacerbated by my mom and her older sister. It was his lack of denial that finally convinced my grandmother and aunts that my mom was telling the truth and their finally accepting that she wasn’t just making up stories to get attention.
On the other side of my family, specifically my step-dad’s side, we have a similar issue. My uncle raped both of my female cousins many times over many years, starting when they were about 12 or 13. My aunt was completely blindsided by this accusation, having no idea. My older cousin was talking to her sister and they both realized, after over a decade of abuse, that this was occurring to both of them. They had both decided not to speak and risk ruining their relationships with their families, when they learned that they were not the only one to suffer. They spoke out. My uncle did not deny the abuse, but blamed it all on my aunt and cousins, and ended up in prison.
This accusation wrecked the relationships between my cousins and those of us who supported them and those who supported my uncle. We used to have their father’s brother and his family over for dinner multiple times a week. They were always welcome at any and every family gathering. They got so enraged by the accusation that they completely cut times, and a decade later, we still haven’t heard anything directly from them except mean spirited commentary.
Both my grandmother and my aunt were completely unaware. My grandfather and uncle were not stupid. They chose times when my grandmother and aunt were out of the house for good reasons, like their jobs. Both my grandfather and my uncle worked non-standard hours with blue collar jobs that had a lot of overtime one week and downtime others, so sometimes they had plenty of free time to play with, though never enough to get a second job. My mom and cousins did show signs, but this happened at that 12-13 age range, where many signs of abuse are masked by typical tween and teen attitude and behavior changes. In hindsight, I can tell when this started to happen to my cousins. We lived far enough away that we noticed distinct behavioral changes, unlike my aunt and grandparents who saw them every day and noticed them as gradual changes, not unlike those of typical teenage rebellion. However, because we saw them so much less, we also assumed that these drastic changes were part of the typical teen behavior.
I will point out that both my grandfather and my uncle accused their wives of not giving them the amount of sex they wanted, and that this was why they raped their daughters. The vast majority of the people around the family in both cases agreed that this was fully on the wives. My grandmother and aunt both have had to fight against it, routinely being treated as the ones who should have taken full blame for their husbands, rather than their husbands. My mom and my cousins have also taken a huge amount of flack for ruining their fathers when it was “mostly their fault” anyway.
The petitioner to Appiah needs to speak out, but yes, it probably will ruin her relationships with her family, it will ruin her parents marriage, and it will bring the ire of the whole community on her head and the head of her mom. These accusations are devastating, and truly do destroy lives.
Yikes. What an awful story. A few things…
1. The petitioner to Appiah needs to speak out, but yes, it probably will ruin her relationships with her family, it will ruin her parents marriage, and it will bring the ire of the whole community on her head and the head of her mom. These accusations are devastating, and truly do destroy lives.
Yes. Also yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and unfortunately yes. But when the accusations are true, the one responsible for all the dstruction is not the victim, but the predator.
2. Of course, a single example does not disprove the general proposition.
3. With each succeeding generation, the likelihood of a spouse not picking up on signs that a child is being abused diminishes. There is so much more coverage and discussion of the issue than there used to be. To your point, though, yes, some people can be incredibly obtuse when the truth is horrible. Without going into sordid details, some aspects of my wife’s sudden demise, signs that should have alerted me to an earlier realization that she needed specific intervention, have become evident as I’ve sifted through the wreckage. And in retrospect, thos signs were obvious, I was aware of them, but I refused to process them and make conclusions (ask questions, investigate, etc.) that would have brought an ugly reality into focus. I literally recall thinking at one point, “This CAN’T be true,” and just putting it aside.
Do spouses “know” what they are refusing to believe in such situations?
Holy Cow!
“[T]the one responsible for all the destruction is not the victim, but the predator.”
Absolutely! And it’s the victims who have to almost invariably bear the unbearable weight of the censure of all the people who should be supporting them! The loss they suffer is incomprehensible.
The siblings (or even parents!) who say the victim has “destroyed the family” are probably the biggest villains in these tragedies. They should be providing support, instead they rape the victim again.
I need to apologize. I should not have said what I did about this being BS. I read this and immediately thought of all the hate that poured out on my Grandmother and Aunt over the abuse. I reacted emotionally rather than logically, and responded without charity. I apologize. This was no way for me to speak to you on your blog.
I do agree wholeheartedly that the abuser needs to be outed, but I think it is only fair to know that the victim and her mother will be getting a huge amount of blame from every corner of society. That isn’t right, but it is the world we live in.
I don’t think that it is right to assume that a wife knew what her husband was doing to their child. These things not only tend to look like normal teenage rebellion, but often crop up when the family is under a great deal of stress, making critical thinking difficult at best. In addition, society in general, and marriage in specific is built on trust. Marriage is often between those who love each other very nearly unconditionally and who trust each other with everything. Most of the time, this leads to a good, healthy household. However, traitors are so reviled across society because of the breach of trust. That is exactly what this is.
It’s funny, I usually react badly to comments like that, but for some reason I knew exactly where yours came from the second I read it.
Sarah, I think you have a treasure trove of credits built up here and everyone’s fully justified high regard for you gave them more than enough pause upon seeing your comment.
I’ll tell you a funny story about what I think women know and don’t know about their husbands. (Short answer: everything and nothing, respectively.) I attended my fiftieth college reunion last June. Much to my surprise, it was very therapeutic for me in that various people asked me what had happened to my three years living together college girlfriend and classmate, who was not in attendance. She dumped me, brutally, three months after we’d graduated and never apologized. The women I spoke to were very sympathetic, which was nice and something Mrs. OB has justifiably never been expected to or requested to be. Anyway, on the last morning of the reunion, I decided on my way to my flight home via a visit to another classmate and friend, I’d just show up at the former girlfriend’s house and speak to her. I shared this insane plan with one of the women I’d spoken to, and she said, “Don’t do it! [Mrs. OB] won’t be happy.” To which I said, like a six-year-old, “I won’t tell her.” To which she responded, “She’ll KNOW.” Whereupon, thankfully, I promptly came to my senses and scrubbed the plan.
And then there’s the song Ry Cooder covered, the relevant lyrics of which have a woman saying to her husband in the chorus, “You’ve been doin, doin, doin’ smomethin’ wrong. I can tell … by the way you smell.”
Cheers.
I don’t think Sarah B. did anything wrong.
Sarah B., I see no reason for you to apologize. You did not initiate the topic, and you did not share your experience gratuitously in order to hijack the conversation. You only responded in order to share your personal experience, chiming in on a topic that was already under discussion.
If people are appalled by your personal experience, that’s not your problem. (I know, sometimes people just say “Sorry” in a colloquial manner, as done by the Brits and the Canadians, as an expression of sympathy without any admission of fault.)
I don’t mean to pick on on our leader Jack Marshall. This is a fantastic blog, and I can’t thank Jack enough for keeping it going.
It’s not clear on what basis Jack made the assertion that the wife probably knows. Offhand it seems to me like an argument from introspection and “just plain thinking in one’s own head.”
Jack wrote in the original post:
“The last point I have to make is that I doubt very much that the mother doesn’t know about the abuse. Spouses of child-abusing parents almost always either know or are in denial.”
To quote one of my professors in graduate school, “That’s an empirical question.”
And, how does one do empirical research on behavior done in secret ?
I’m sure somebody has greater insight. I would check with an expert on sex crimes investigation.
As your self-appointed bookworm, I have just the citation for you. It’s a book which I found riveting and appalling when I picked it up from a public library display during “Sexual Assault Awareness Month” one April.
_Predators_ by Anna Salter.
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/anna-salter/predators/9781541673748/?lens=basic-books
One assertion made by the author (Anna Salter) is that it is extraordinarily difficult to detect sexual predators who victimize children. Deflecting predators is easy. Detecting them is hard.
By the way, research studies indicate that the average person who thinks he/she is good at detecting a lie is actually pretty bad at it.
Charles Abbott
Rochester NY