You Were Supposed to Protect Me. Why Did You Hurt Me?
Time after time, no matter what decade we are living in there are always those in power that will turn a blind eye to those who need help. The issue at hand is institutions turning their backs on the victims, and ignoring them when they gather the courage to speak up. That is exactly what the USA Gymnastics Board of Directors did when victims of Larry Nassar went public. For those who are unaware of who Larry Nassar is, he was the USA gymnastics doctor/ USA Gymnastics Medical Coordinator. He was in charge of caring for the USA Olympic team. His job was to create polices which prevents harm to future athletes. Instead, Larry Nassar has been abusing his power for a least 30 years to sexually abuse and harass athletes.
For years, his victims were made to feel like it was their fault, and they were the problem. According to Rachel Denhollande, one of the many victims of Nassar, victims would be told that “they were lucky to be seen by Larry” and that victims were “patronized and treated like uneducated females”. When you are told that you should be grateful to be seen by your abuser it hurts you. Just because he was a well-renown doctor does not give him the right to sexually abuse his victims.
The first complaint made against Larry Nassar was made in 1997 by Larissa Boyce, a teenage gymnast. Larissa Boyce and a fellow teammate reported to the Michigan State coach at the time Kathie Klages that they were not comfortable with Nassar’s treatments. According to Larissa’s testimony and other testimonies made by multiple victims his “treatments” would include penetrating them vaginally with ungloved hands. There have been girls and women who have tried reporting Nassar for years, but everyone defended Nassar. According to Denhollande officials and psychologists from Michigan State University and USA Gymnastics have been brushing off the victims off for decades “as being unable to tell the difference between a medical exam and sexual violation”. There is a very clear line between a medical exam and being sexually violated, and to tell those victims that they are confusing the two is insulting and hurtful. I believe that they brushed victims off because they personally do not want to admit that it is happening. To admit the incident means to admit fault for what happened.
USA Gymnastics is not the only institution to have issues with abusing people’s human rights. The prison system is also guilty of looking past the sexual abuse women go through in prison by prison guards. In Angela Y. Davis’s article “Public Imprisonment and Private Violence” she summarizes a report called “All Too Familiar: Sexual Abuse of Women in U.S. State Prisons”, which talks about the findings of the abuse on female inmates. The article found that “male correctional employees have vaginally, anally, and orally raped female prisoners and sexually assaulted and abused them”. Few people know what is going on within the prison walls and those who know do not care to try to change it. What is happening in prison is eerily similar to what Nassar is doing to young girls.
Davis also mentions in her article that “although guard-on-prisoner sexual abuse is not sanctioned as such, the widespread leniency with which offending officers are treated, suggests that for women, prison is a space in which the threat of sexualized violence that looms in the larger society is effectively sanctioned as a routine aspect of the landscape of punishment behind prison walls. There seems to be a pattern with these cases. Both Nassar and these prison guards all single out women alone in confined spaces and abuse the authority they have. They make their victims scared to question their abuse for fear of the consequences.
Nassar was able to get away with this for so long because the USA Gymnastics turned a blind eye to what was going on and protected him. They claim athlete care is their number one priority, but then when there are several claims about Nassar’s abuse, what did they do to protect their athletes? The USA Olympic committee refused to conduct an investigation and defended USA Gymnastics as one of the leaders in developing policies to protect athletes. Even when Nassar was under a criminal investigation in 2014 for sexual misconduct USA Gymnastics still allowed Nassar to treat athletes for 16 months. Angela Davis would argue that Nassar was still allowed to treat athletes because he is an influential white doctor that is male. Nassar should have been removed from practice when the criminal investigation came out. They should have thought that maybe all those previous women who tried to speak out against Nassar in the past was telling the truth.
It seems as if the reason why all these cases of sexual abuse against women exist to this day is because the institutions that are put there to protect them do not care about what happens to them. In the end, it is a business to them because they are still paid, and that makes it seem sound. That is not right and this needs to change, but the only way to change is for society to change. It is our society that believes and supports the predator before we believe the victim. As a society, we are so quick to put the blame on the victim, and to turn a blind eye to those who are doing wrong. In gold medalist Aly Raisman’s testimony she states that “if over these many years just one adult listened and had the courage and character to act this tragedy could have been avoided”. We as a society need to change, and we need to stop empowering these monsters, who believe they can hurt other people without consequences. These monsters have power because society does not want to believe there is anything wrong. It is easier to remain ignorant than to face the truth. The truth is that sexual abuse and assault is probably happening everywhere, whether we choose to accept it or not. When you are told that you should be grateful to be seen by your abuser it hurts. His esteemed status gives him no right to sexually abuse women without consequences.
