Conservatives Don’t Give A Damn About Victims of Sexual Assault
Image; Elle
I don’t even remember her that well. Her face and her name have been sapped away by time. She was a friend of mine in Catholic school, as much as someone as deeply depressed and dysphoric as I could make friends at that point. I remember her being fearless. She was sardonic, always quick to deliver a funny quip, and she would smile whenever she knew one of her jokes was appreciated.
Then one day, she was gone.
When I asked why she had left, I received a response through whispers and hushed conversations that a priest had touched her. I didn’t know what that meant. It would take me years to piece together that she had been assaulted, but I knew that the priest had done something wrong and that that was linked to her leaving my school.
Few would even speak about this openly with me, and I remember no one explaining why she was punished and not the priest, but I think I have my answer years later. He was in a position of power, and she was not. The Archdiocese of Newark was more interested in protecting its reputation than serving someone in its flock. It would take years of work from liberal and leftist activists and reporters for this truth to get out, and by then, the man in question would be gone.
There has been much talk of “groomers” from conservatives (note grooming in this context refers to pedophiles coercing children into sexual acts without being caught). Many conservatives claim that people who defend transgender and other LGBT people are nothing more than groomers. “The bill that liberals inaccurately call ‘Don’t Say Gay’ would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill,” Ron DeSantis’s press secretary erroneously and hatefully tweeted on March 4th.
Yet, when I think of my nameless friend, it wasn't liberals or leftists who forced her to leave my community but conservative administrators and officials who didn’t want the scandal to hurt their church’s reputation. And there are many more examples of this event. When we look at modern conservatism as a political movement within the US, it often creates an environment where grooming is rampant.
Conservatism and deference
Before we jump into the more heated parts of this article, I want to make a quick aside and say that “no, trans people and their defenders are not inherent abusers.” We are not even going to entertain this accusation as valid. Trans people are far more likely to suffer abuse than dole it out. This latest tactic from conservative politicians and pundits is nothing more than an attempt to scapegoat a marginalization community by painting them as the “real” enemy—a classic example of false persecution that I have written about before.
It should also be noted that abuse can come from any side of the political spectrum. It's relatively easy to cherry-pick anecdotes of abusers and claim that they are representative of an entire people or culture. In the same way, I can post a link to an awful liberal abuser; I can also find one of an appalling conservative. People are people, and no identity is immune from abusing its power, even hardcore leftists who claim to be radical, intersectional feminists. While I could chronicle the many groomer conservative politicians and pundits we’ve seen throughout the years in a gotcha-style article, it's more helpful to show how current conservative ideology often preserves abuse on a systemic level.
Although contested by many (see Stanford Encylopedia), the primary goal of conservatism seems heavily rooted in the principle of showing deference to the status quo. There are many reasons for that impulse. Some might want to preserve stability because they argue it's the best way to organize society. Others value the preservation of the free market, which means fighting off progressive change in our current neoliberal environment. More might have a predisposition to authority and order in general. And, of course, conservatives on top might be doing so to merely protect disruptions to their interests.
Whatever the reason, as a consequence, this deference to the status quo often translates to conservatives backing traditional, mainstream institutions: the military, the nation, the police. If there is a symbol or institution that represents (and often protects) our current neoliberal economic order, then chances are the conservative movement has laid claim to it as its own.
And right away, we see where this creates an interesting dilemma that, although not unique to conservatism, is very prevalent within it. What happens when abuses of power exist within these institutions conservatives have crafted an identity around? If conservatives are so deadset on protecting the military, for example, as an institution, then what happens when a problem develops within that institution?
Will they be quick or even capable of addressing it?
Grooming in the Military
This question isn’t hypothetical. For decades the US military has had a rampant sexual abuse and harassment problem. A 2021 study from the RAND Corporation found that “….one in 16 women and one in 143 men [were] estimated to experience sexual assault within [the] DoD.”
This disturbing trend is something higher-ups have known about for literal decades. One of the first significant scandals to break the news was a conference in Las Vegas in 1991, known retrospectively as the Tailhook scandal, where seven men and 83 women officially reported incidents of sexual assault and harassment.
The culture of the military, which is an overwhelmingly conservative institution, has been one of denial and dismissal. Historically an alarming number of victims who file a report about their abuse have suffered retaliation. According to a 2016 investigation by the Department of Defense’s Office of the Inspector General, nearly a quarter of service members who left the military after reporting a sexual assault in the 2009 to 2015 period received a less-than-fully-honorable discharge. Something that requires a lot of time and effort to appeal and can prevent victims from getting resources such as education under the G.I. bill and VA Benefits — the latter of which prevents them from accessing the mental health services they may need. As one officer laments about their sexual assault:
“I was 18 years old, was a mental mess, and was terrified to be back aboard [the ship] any longer than I had to. I wasn’t protected, I wasn’t helped, I wasn’t safe from any type of harm!! So how did I actually know what I was signing or even in fact what an OTH [Other Than Honorable] discharge was to mean? How was I to know that from all the sexual attacks that I had to suffer and the harassment, assaults, threats to my life and safety that for all these years the [discharge would be] a huge factor to how I lived and how my life ended up?”
And these are the dots we can trace within the official record. For years, this implicit threat of reprisal has created an environment where many people in the military do not feel like they can speak out and often choose to “put up” with their abuse instead.
In other words, it's been an environment encouraging grooming on a systemic level.
You would think that conservatives would care about stopping this grooming within an institution they seem to care about —that's what they claim to do with these “don’t say gay” bills and puberty blocker bans (and to be fair, there have been a few token conservatives throughout the decades who do speak out). Yet most reforms have historically not been pushed for by the conservative wings of either party. In fact, conservative factions are often the ones actively working to stop reforms in these areas.
For example, one barrier within the military is how these cases have been handled legally. Military law is not regulated like civilian law. The Uniform Code of Military Justice has allowed military commanders to decide whether to investigate and pursue legal action for incidents of sexual assault. For reference, that would be like allowing a manager at a company to determine whether an investigation could go forward with their employees. There clearly would be a perverse incentive structure for companies like Walmart or Amazon to protect their reputation over the welfare of their employees, and we see the same thing with the military. Time and time again, the interest of the victim has been ignored.
Since 2013, Senator Gillibrand has introduced a bill that, among other things, would remove the authority of the “chain of command” to prosecute sexual assaults and other major military crimes. So rather than your superior deciding these cases, the DoD would commission officers independent from the chain of command to make these decisions instead.
Yet, this reform has been blocked repeatedly by the more conservative wings of Congress. In 2014, the bill came close to passing, with just five votes shy of a Filibuster majority. Even Mitch McConnell threw his hat in the ring over what he probably thought would be good ammunition against his female challenger, Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes. However, the bill ultimately failed after more conservative voices argued it would be “impractical” and “naive,” with 35 Republicans and 10 Democrats voting against it.
Note that conservatism here doesn’t just include Republicans. The Democratic Party is a big tent, and there are plenty of Democrats that lean to the right on many issues (see Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, etc.). In the case of this 2014 law, this included Claire McCaskill, a moderate who fought hard to ensure those 10 Democrats did not back Gillibrand’s bill. We could say the same for Democrat Adam Smith, a conservative Dem who supported the Iraq War and voted against a mild NSA reform, who worked with three other men to help strip Gillibrand’s provision from 2021’s National Defense Authorization Act.
These aren’t leftist positions. The opposition to help victims on this issue might sometimes have a “D” next to their name, but they aren't on the left.
Grooming in the Catholic Church
We’ve so far focused on the military as an example, but this problem is replicated in any environment where power dynamics are unequal and toxic levels of deference encourage obstructionism. We could likewise talk about sexual assault in prisons, ICE detention facilities, or, as we already discussed, the sexual assault scandals among authority figures within the catholic church.
It probably doesn't need an explanation but let's do a recap anyway. For years, priests, nuns, and other religious officials abused their positions to take advantage of the children in their flocks. This isn’t a new occurrence. It’s been happening for a long time. However, starting in the 90s, these incidents began to receive significant media attention, whereas earlier, they would receive mere whispers, and calls for reform began to build.
It’s taken a lot of effort for us, as a society, to even feel comfortable talking about this scandal, and again, even moderate laws trying to improve this situation have been bogged down with obstructionism. One significant barrier for younger victims of sexual assault is that the way grooming works (i.e., coming across as innocuous to victims) often means it takes years for victims to realize that a problem has even happened. Consequently, there has been a significant movement to temporarily extend the age a former child victim can press civil and criminal charges (sometimes referred to as a “lookback window”).
The Catholic Church has spent a lot of money lobbying against these laws, often using a frustrating amount of deception to “mitigate risk” (i.e., protect abusers). When Maryland lawmakers tried to pass one of these laws, they found that Catholic lobbyists had deceived them into providing a permanent exemption for the Church. Crafter of the law, and former abuse victim, Democrat C.T. Wilson told The Washington Post: “I made a deal with the devil. I was working with them in good faith.… They were behind the scenes, crafting language that protects them forever.”
The Church is no stranger to manipulating people to stop reform, but you know where they generally have support — the sympathetic ears of more conservative lawmakers. As the communication director for assemblywoman Markey said of an attempt to pass a similar reform in New York in 2016: “The Republican-dominated Senate has always been the stumbling block for final passage. They have blocked even committee consideration of the bill over the past few years.” (Note: a version of this law was finally passed in New York three years later in 2019 after Republicans lost control of the Senate). We have seen similar bills blocked in Pennsylvania and even in the US Senate — all by Republican obstructionism.
From extending Title IX guidelines to abolishing child marriage laws, there are a lot of policies that could help protect children and adults from grooming. If the current conservative movement in the US cared about protecting people from sexual assault, you would think it would be urgently pushing to pass these laws, but again, that’s not what we are seeing.
Far from it, when it comes to actually stopping grooming, conservatives don’t seem to give a damn at all.
Conclusion
I often think about what would have happened if my school and church had taken steps to stop that vile man from abusing his flock. If they had created an environment where abusers were not insulated from accountability and justice. Would the events I described in the beginning still have happened?
At the very least, I might still know my friend’s name.
Many people probably wanted me to post examples of individual conservatives grooming people — homophobic politicians sleeping with underage children, pastors engaging in child marriages, and the like. But as awful as these examples are, this problem is worse than a few individuals abusing their power. On a systemic level, conservative leaders are not interested in creating policy to protect citizens from sexual assault and, worse, actively get in the way of this goal.
I am sure that many individual conservatives are very lovely people who have never committed any sexual assaults (please, keep doing that). This issue has less to do with individual abusers and, again, more about systems of power. While liberals and leftists are not immune to abuses of power, current US conservatism is a movement with a toxic level of deference that turns followers, if not into abusers, then at the very least into enablers.
It’s a political movement eager to defend those in power at the expense of their victims — and if anything promotes grooming, it’s that.