The news that celebrated Canadian author Alice Munro knew about her husband sexually assaulting her daughter (his stepdaughter) and yet chose to stay with him until his death — even after he admitted to the abuse — has shocked literary fans around the world. The gut-wrenching personal essay by the Nobel Prize-winning author’s daughter Andrea Robin Skinner has compelled some people to engage in difficult conversations about art and the fallible — sometimes, downright ugly — human beings behind the beauty created.
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While lovers of her fiction are left pondering what this means for Munro’s literary legacy, my thoughts are with sexual assault survivors everywhere who, like Skinner, are here to remind us that equally damaging to the violence itself can be the betrayal and complicity of silence that often follow it. Learning that both Munro and her husband left their nine-year-old daughter alone with a pedophile is a hard thing to process, yet statistics show most sexual assaults are committed by people we know, trust and love. Many of those predators are in fact protected by people we know, trust and love.
Naysayers insist that as a society we don’t “tolerate” sexual assault, but we do. We downplay the severity of these acts by the words we choose to describe them; we cast doubts and aspersions on survivors’ motivations when they denounce their abuse, thereby invalidating their experience, and we worry about what it does to “good young men” who “made one mistake.”
Prison sentences were finally handed to two former Quebec junior hockey league players who pleaded guilty last October of sexually assaulting a minor at a hotel. The players are appealing the sentence. Hockey Canada has been rocked by scandal ever since it was revealed that close to $9 million has been paid out in settlements in 21 sexual misconduct cases since 1989. The news shocked Canadians, but perhaps also allowed some to realize that “rape culture” is more than just an uncomfortable-to-them slogan “angry feminists” yell out. It’s a descriptor for a culture and a society that too often prioritize protecting rapists instead of those who are raped.
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Not only did these hockey players assault this young girl, but they filmed a video without her knowledge, which one of them subsequently rushed downstairs to share with teammates and a coach. A team employee, upon seeing it, told him to delete it. To my knowledge, none of these witnesses reported the incident. They simply erased the evidence.
A Dutch volleyball player who raped a 12-year-old British girl in 2014 has qualified for the Paris Olympics. It’s hard to argue that our society truly takes sexual assault seriously when someone can be convicted of three counts of raping a minor, placed on a permanent sex offenders registry and still qualify for one of the most prestigious sporting events in the world.
The fact that U.S. President Joe Biden seemed tired and confused at a recent debate appears to have created more panic and unease among certain political commentators and voters than the fact that Donald Trump, his opponent, has been accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women and is the first president judged liable for sexual assault by a jury of his peers. Why?
The revelations about Munro’s daughter left to fend for herself after her stepfather abused her left me sad, but not surprised. The reason rape and abuse remain among the most under-reported crimes is that most survivors already know they probably won’t get any justice if they report it.
Society’s minimization of the act itself and the lack of consequences for perpetrators create a culture of silence. Sexual abusers don’t just rely on someone’s complicity, they thrive on it. The complicity sends the message that the sexual abuse is not that important — and that, ultimately, neither is the person being sexually abused.
Toula Drimonis is a Montreal journalist and the author of We, the Others: Allophones, Immigrants, and Belonging in Canada. She can be reached on X @toulastake
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