Summer Camp Is Coming! So It's Time to Talk about Sexual Abuse.
Sorry to douse the campfire.
This newsletter is dedicated in the memory of Chuck Broches, z”l, by Connie Kanter.
Sorry for the lateness! My goal is to get these out on Fridays. Sometimes Tuesday is the new Friday. Ki tov, ki tov.
A friend of mine once told me that having a child is “like wearing your heart on the outside of your body.”
The fear that something will go wrong starts the moment the pregnancy test reads positive. Making it to birth feels like a miracle. And then the real fear begins, a fear that, oddly, you didn’t see coming. The fears just evolve. SIDS fear passes, the baby gates come down, swimming lessons happen. But then. What about the the world Out There? The other people? Where are the foam corner guards for all those creeps our kids are going to bump into?
As we know in our rational brains, we live in extraordinarily safe times. Laws (car seats, helmets, life jackets) and general American privilege amount to very low rates of death, injury, and general bad stuff. I struggle on the daily with how much freedom to give my kids: it’s a constant negotiation between data and culture. We know (or we should know by now) that shielding our children from all potential danger is setting them up for weakness and ineptitude. But what about the 1 percent chance something will go wrong on that walk around the block? What about that one news story I read last year about that random horrible thing that happened to that wonderful family? Lock the doors!
The other thing we know is that the biggest dangers are the ones that don’t present as such. (For perspective, see this chart. Will it make you less likely to change your diet and take up jogging?) When it comes to sexual abuse, it’s far more likely that the perpetrator knows the child well. Most cases are not the equivalent of freak accidents; they are cases of safety mechanisms malfunctioning often under our own supposed supervision.
This week’s interview is with the inimitable Rahel Bayar, a sex crimes prosecutor I became acquainted with during the few short years she lived in Seattle. Rahel recently opened her own practice to thwart sexual abuse before it potentially happens. She helps us break down some myths and also empower all of us — not just parents — to prioritize children and teens so we can empower kids to keep themselves safe, even after we take all the proverbial baby gates down.
—Emily
“It’s Really Hard for Us to Think about What It Means to Protect our Children from Something That Isn’t Physically in Front of Us”
Rahel Bayar is a sex crimes and child abuse prosecutor who recently opened her own practice, The Bayar Group, to work with faith-based organizations, camps, workplaces, and schools to “develop a usable roadmap for creating and enhancing safe spaces, as well as identifying and addressing underlying systemic risks” related to child abuse prevention, sexual misconduct, harassment, and discrimination. Rahel lived in Seattle for a few years before returning to the East Coast, where she lives with her family.
You just opened your own practice after years as a sex crimes prosecutor. What precipitated this move?
When I went to law school, I knew that I wanted to work at a prosecutor’s office. I knew that I wanted to practice law in a way that was about seeking justice for others.
I grew up in a home of parents who did everything from a values-based perspective. There was this concept of, what Is the value that you’re adding to the world, you know, what are the actions that you partake in? What is the way that you add your voice in your own unique way? That was a piece of my childhood and a piece of my formative years.
I think that on some level, working in the child abuse and sex crimes bureau was about seeking justice for those that, at that moment in their life, at that moment in time, they are at their most vulnerable. And being able to understand that no matter how many cases you have, that no matter how big the docket is, each case is representative of an individual who is experiencing probably the worst moment of the lives and the ability to seek justice for them is something that is very, very powerful and very hard.
I was intrigued with how much work could go into preventing these types of crimes, and what happens when the statute of limitations has run and law enforcement can’t do anything and justice can’t be served. And so, I ended up going to a global investigative firm and worked in their sexual misconduct consulting and investigations division, with phenomenal people who are all former sex crimes prosecutors. I spent about five years doing consulting on policies and procedures, doing a lot of training across the country on abuse prevention and investigations, which then led me to start The Bayar Group.
What should the average Jewish parent be most aware of, and what are our biggest blind spots of parents and as Jews?
Sexual abuse happens everywhere. It permeates all different religions. It permeates all socio-economic levels. It permeates all communities. There’s no such thing as saying, “It doesn’t happen here,” or “It couldn’t happen here.” And I think that one of the biggest blind spots that we have, especially being in a Jewish community, is this idea that when we know someone and we live in this communal environment where between our synagogue and our school and our youth group, have such familiarity with everyone. This is our biggest blind spot.
The CDC numbers are that 91 percent of child sexual abuse is actually perpetrated by someone that the child or the child’s family knows. This notion of training our kids to think about the scary stranger, or this notion of us thinking that we would be able to tell if someone gave off creepy vibes or we would be able to automatically know what someone’s intentions are [is also a blind spot]. Though the scary stranger crimes do happen, and though there are times when that creepy factor or that those kinds of boundary crossing behaviors worry parents, in many, many cases, people who commit sexual crimes against children fly under the radar. And the reason why is because in order to sexually abuse a child, you have to have access to kids.
And in order to have access to kids, you have to be good with kids, which means that there’s this fallacy that we would automatically be able to tell if someone was intending to do bad things to our kids. This notion is one of the most important things and the hardest things that I think parents struggle with, because it is really scary to think about the fact that we put our kids in positions where they may be vulnerable to someone. If we, as parents, are aware of the fact that there is a vulnerability, no matter who your child is, no matter who your family is, no matter how much money you have, then we have to ensure that the places that we put our kids and the people that we entrust our kids with take abuse prevention as seriously as we should.
I usually liken it to the way that we think about water safety or the way that we think about teaching our kids how to cross the street. We don’t turn to our kids and say, if you don’t look both ways, when you cross the street, you’re going to get hit by a truck. You’re going to die. Your insides are going to be splattered all over the place, right? We don’t go into graphic detail about what it would look like. What we say to our kids is, “It’s really important that you look both ways and that you listen.” And when do we do this? When we’re walking with our kids, right? We don’t sit them down in the living room and stress them out with a serious talk. We have that talk while we’re walking with them. We show them, we model that behavior. And then with our tone and our voice and the words that we use, we make it clear how important that is. We take this approach of, let’s work to teach our kids, to give our kids tools so that they understand the importance, but the onus is not on them. It’s actually on us to make sure our kids are safe.
Right. And it’s really hard for parents to do that. Why is it hard?
I think because at its core sexual abuse is a really scary concept. The idea that someone that you might know or trust could hurt your child. The idea that you might not see a bruise, or a mark, this is not something that a trip to the ER might be able to help fix. I think it’s really hard for parents to realize that even if you have a phenomenal relationship with your child, the way that abusers work is that they groom children. And they groom children in a way that a child starts to not only rely on that abuser, but trust that abuser.
I’ve heard parents say things like, well, you know, I tell my kids, “They can tell me anything.” But the kids don’t automatically do that. Kids also can make mistakes in terms of their regular life. A kid might do something with a friend and then realize, “Oh my gosh, my parent is going to be so upset at me” and then not tell their parents. Well, imagine if an abuser is in a situation where they have groomed this child, this child now trusts this person. They believe this person only has their best interests at heart. Maybe they’ve given them special gifts or brought them special treats or taken them to special places. They’ve cultivated this manipulative relationship. And then that abuser tells the child, “If you tell your parents, your parents will hate you. They will disown you. They will think that you’re lying. You will destroy your family.” And the onus of that, that might sit on the shoulders of a 6-year-old or a 16-year-old. That’s the weight of the world. And so as parents, it’s really hard for us to think about what it means to protect our children from something that isn’t physically in front of us.
We are really good at talking to our kids about fire safety, because we understand when there’s a fire, we can smell it. We can see it. We recognize the seriousness of it, right? We’re really good at talking about things like other types of safety, because we recognize you’re going to be by a pool or you’re going to need to cross the street. But sexual abuse is so under reported. And it’s also something that, that for many, many kids is something that they feel so much shame and so much fear about that.
As parents, it’s difficult to wrap our heads around how it is that we can protect our kids from this and still send them to school and send them to camp and send them to youth groups. I think the biggest piece in the Jewish community, what’s happened over the past few years is people are talking about it. Those who have been victims of sexual abuse are coming forward and telling their stories; it has become less taboo. It doesn’t mean that taboo doesn’t exist, but people have come forward. More people are using social media as a platform to reach other people that have survived the same types of things. And there’s tremendous power in that. And I think that all it takes is one person in a community to come forward and say, “We have to have these preventative measures in place. We have to have policies and procedures that make sense. We have to train the people that are working with our kids and truth is we have to train ourselves as well.” What I see is a big shift. It’s not perfect, but I’ve seen a big shift and a lot of places that were not willing to invest in that before are now willing to invest in the time that it really takes.
It seems like people still choose not to believe victims, especially if the person who is alleged to have abused someone is well respected. There is a defense mechanism, I think, that kicks in sometimes in our communities, where we don’t want actually to deal with it on a public level for a number of reasons. What does that say about us?
I will say that in most of the places that I go into, they recognize that they don’t know how to handle any of this. Therefore, they want to bring in someone from the outside and actually be educated. And I think that the trick when it comes to proper education in this realm is not to talk at the community, but to talk with the community and to explain certain things like, for example, their concerns of damaging reputations or the concerns of lashon hara. The idea of saving a life, it supersedes Shabbat, it supersedes everything else. And if we know that stopping abuse is saving a life, then believing a child is beyond important.
The argument that because a child or a teenager may exhibit problematic behaviors means that we shouldn’t believe them is not only false, but it’s incredibly dangerous and damaging because people who abuse kids, many of them will actually be able to manipulate those vulnerabilities, because they know that no one’s going to believe that kid if that kid comes forward. So they’re going to find a vulnerability in a kid, and it may not be a vulnerability that you see or that I see. There are a variety of different types of people that abuse and a variety of different kids that are abused. But the bottom line is that the whole way that grooming works is with manipulation.
And with the knowledge that if this kid comes forward, no one’s going to believe them. And that is evident in closed communities where people are more apt to believe the person who is accused than to believe that the child or the teenager, because there’s a vulnerability there; maybe that teenager has been caught using drugs or drinks a lot, or, from certain people’s perspective, has had other issues or problematic behavior.
What is behind that? Do we not value children? At the same time, we never really know what the truth is and how they see the world through their very small lens of reality. Especially the younger they are, the harder it is to know. “How many cookies did you actually eat?” You know, they don’t actually know. So how do we break through that problem?
You don’t. You let the professionals sort through what it means to conduct a forensic interview of a child. But when your kid shows up to you and says something that sounds off or that you automatically have that sinking feeling in your stomach, you have to make an assumption that your kid is telling the truth, because no kid wants to be the person to come forward and say, “Something bad happened to me.”
I mean, what it takes for kids to come forward, they know everybody’s going to hate them. They know it’s going to tear their family apart. They know it’s going to tear their community apart. And especially when you have someone who’s in more of a position of power or authority, it’s absolutely going to already have been told to the kid that no one would believe that. Why would a kid, why would any teenager choose that for their family and for themselves?
And it doesn’t matter how much trouble that kid has been in. It doesn’t matter whether they are intellectually challenged, it doesn’t matter whether they have learning disabilities, it doesn’t matter if they are socially awkward. It doesn’t matter, because people who abuse find those vulnerabilities and exploit them, because they know that you won’t believe that kid. So are we really saying as a community that the onus is on a child to protect themselves from an abuser? We’re the parents, we’re the adults. And it’s our responsibility to protect our kids, not the other way around.
The whole “innocent before guilty” idea has really pervaded our thinking. I was speaking with a prosecutor a while back who explained to me that the testimony is evidence. So we think, Oh, there’s no evidence, because no one saw it. There’s nothing we can do to prove it. But the fact that they said it is evidence.
Most of the time in a sexual assault or sexual abuse case, this notion that you’re automatically going to have DNA or, maybe something caught on video — that happens rarely. All of the sex crimes cases that I had, there were definitely cases that had DNA and there were definitely cases that didn’t have any DNA. The victim’s testimony is just as significant as DNA, because they’re telling you what happened to them.
When someone is innocent until proven guilty, that applies in a court of law. That does not mean that you allow that person to continue teaching in your school or working in your shul or working in your camp because you don’t have enough evidence to prove that they sexually abused child. And it doesn’t mean that every situation is exactly the same, but if everybody’s shifted their thinking to putting our kids first and to recognizing that, because there is no magic serum, you’re not necessarily going to know when someone is actually abusing a kid. If we all believed kids when they came forward, we wouldn’t have this many allegations of abuse. But kids come forward, and people don’t believe them. And that is something to be embarrassed about.
You’re doing a lot of trainings now to prevent this abuse before it happens. If there was one message or magic bullet you could release, what would it be?
I wish that every single child-facing organization, whether it’s a school or a camp, a youth organization, a synagogue, a church, no matter what, understood that it is their responsibility to ensure that they have done the best job that they possibly can to ensure that their kids are safe and that the people around them are safe.
How can we best ensure that our kids are safe and that they have an understanding of what consent is and what abuse is? What’s the type of language that we should be using, even starting in preschool? How are we educating our faculty and staff to make sure that they don’t put themselves in a position where they’re accused by someone else of crossing a boundary with a student, because they never thought about it from that perspective, because they were never trained on that? How are we as a school partnering with parents? I don’t believe that a school has to educate their parent community on something, but I believe that a school has a responsibility to educate their faculty and staff. And if they choose to educate their students as well, on some level they have to partner with families to give parents the opportunity to understand what it is they’re doing.
I grew up before the internet was really a thing. Now, with the new levels of danger and information, how can kids, especially older kids, be equipped with the proper educational foundation to avoid trouble?
Over the course of the past few years, one of the big things that I have been doing and have seen a lot of schools bring me in to do is working with middle school as well as high school on what it means to think about safety when it comes to how we connect online.
So for example, kids are absolutely sending naked texts to each other. It’s a huge thing in middle school and high school. And in the Jewish community, I hear people say all the time, “No way, that doesn’t happen.” There have been actually a bunch of Jewish Orthodox schools where I have trained middle school students over the course of the past few years. And I always ask a series of questions. “How many of you know someone that has been asked for a nude picture? How many of you know someone that has asked someone else for a nude picture? How many of you knew someone that has actually sent a nude picture?” Parents would absolutely say, “That’s never happening.” You have anywhere from like 60 to 90 percent of the kids that raise their hands.
I ask these questions in front of the teachers and in front of the administration, because I want them to see and understand that what we think is happening is different than what’s actually happening. And that’s kind of to be expected, because kids are exploratory by nature, right? And their notion of consequences is different from the way that as adults, we think about consequences.
You’re not just leaving the kid with all of this information. You’re actually giving the parents a lead to start the conversation with their child. And that is very, very powerful, because what it says is we acknowledge that no matter how religious you are, no matter how frum you are, these are issues that are happening, especially now with the move to hybrid learning online learning.
When bad things happen, kids are going to be less likely to come to their parents and tell them about it, because they’re not going to feel like they can, because maybe they screwed something up or maybe they feel as though they did something wrong when really they were victimized.
After doing what you do all day, how do you sleep at night? I’m sure you get that a lot.
I have a lot of faith in people doing the right thing. I speak on a daily basis to people that have made this a core value and are committed to ensuring that it permeates their school or their camp or their faith-based institution or their workplace, and that they work together to make their place safer. There are so many people who want to do the right thing, they just need the right tools to do it.
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Shoutouts!
Shoutout for the Hadassah Virtual Gala! Special honorees: Seattle Jewish nurses. —Meryl Alcabes
Condolences to the Hashash family on the loss far, far too early of Asher, who was a wonderful musician, man about town, and all-around lovely person. —Joel Magalnick
And mazel tov to the Speizer family on their son Yoni becoming a bar mitzvah this weekend. —Joel Magalnick
A very merry unbirthday to the incredible Rachel Rosenfeld (Feb 29th)! —Dina Levitan
Shoutout to one of my Jewish heroes, Art Shamsky, who was a part-time right-fielder for the 1969 NY “Miracle” Mets, who won the World Series after being the laughingstock of Major League Baseball for the first seven years of their existence. Shamsky came out of obscurity to be one of the best hitters on the team, and made his Jewish heritage quite clear in September of that year when he sat out games on Rosh Hashana. —Cliff Meyer
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