The Ones Who Can't Report It

Three switches lit red and labeled MUTE, the only word on the panel that isn’t lit.

A room with one adult and one child who cannot speak is typically not an issue by itself, provided the right context and if the person should be with the child in first place. It becomes dangerous only in combination with certain other facts: that no one else can see inside it, the child’s account, if he had one, would not be trusted over the adult’s, and that whatever happens there will have to be proven by something other than his own telling of it.

This is worth thinking through because the instinct after hearing about abuse is to ask what kind of person does this. That question does matters, but it often arrives late. The earlier and more answerable question is what kind of environment allows it? The kind built around someone who cannot report it.

Voicelessness takes more forms than the obvious one. A child too young to be believed, a patient too sedated to remember clearly, an elder whose confusion is assumed before it’s confirmed, a congregant whose faith has already taught them not to question authority, or a client whose diagnosis gets cited as a reason to doubt her own account before anyone examines whether the account is true. These people are silent because the environment and power dynamics around them has been primed for people looking for easy victims to pursue.

That is what makes certain roles quietly dangerous. Not necessarily the people who fill these roles, but roles hands out unearned credibility to whoever occupies it. A caregiver’s word outweighs a nonverbal child’s behavior, a clinician’s note outweighs a patient’s memory, a pastor’s reputation outweighs a member’s discomfort. These roles are what trust looks like structurally, before anyone has done anything to deserve or betray it.

Which means the actual protective work isn’t mainly about screening for bad people, though that matters too. The protective work should be aimed towards also noticing where the imbalance is steepest and building in friction there…. a second set of eyes, a rotation instead of a fixed one-on-one, a policy that treats “no witnesses” itself as a risk factor rather than a scheduling convenience. Institutions that take this seriously tend to look, from the inside, mildly paranoid about their own best employees. That discomfort is often the sign the safeguard is working.

There’s a reason surveillance footage keeps surfacing in these cases as the event that finally moved the case forward. The camera did what his voice structurally could not, which is a strange thing to have to rely on, and a stranger thing to consider standard practice for protecting people who cannot advocate for themselves.

None of these excuses the individual choice to exploit that structure. Choosing to use a condition is still a choice, made by someone, in a specific moment, and that person bears the weight of it regardless of how favorable the room was. But if the response to abuse stops at removing one person from one room, the room itself stays exactly as it was, waiting for whoever fills it next.

The child in the room didn’t choose to be nonverbal. He didn’t choose the room, the shift schedule, or who was assigned to watch him that day. Somebody else made every one of those choices, usually without thinking of them as choices at all.

This is the second essay in a series on power, predation, and the conditions that make abuse of trust possible. Read the first: The Myth of the Monster.

Nando Schlecht is a Licensed Associate Counselor and trauma therapist specializing in complex trauma, dissociation, and nervous system regulation. More writing at nandotherapy.com.