Co-authored by Dr. Guila Benchimol and Dr. Alissa Ackerman

TW; CW: This post discusses sexual violence.

Consuming recent media coverage about sexual abuse is making us unwell. We feel like we have a low-grade illness. We are nauseous. We can’t sleep or find comfort as we decide how much to take in and when to turn away. As Jewish criminologists, we study how sexual violence operates. As restorative justice practitioners, we try to hold harm-doers and bystanders accountable to and for survivors. And as survivors, this coverage is landing in our bodies. 

The headlines about sexual violence are relentless: in immigration detention facilities, the documents related to Jeffrey Epstein and his network of powerful men, Gisèle Pelicot’s courageous and heartbreaking interviews, and additional testimony about sexual violence from Arbel Yehoud and others taken hostage on October 7. Everywhere we turn, there is another story of sexual abuse. 

We have been thinking about survivors everywhere. Do what you need to take care of yourselves. Know that the feeling in the pit of your stomach is normal. Disorientation, numbness, dysregulation, or dread do not mean that there is anything wrong with you. It means that you are feeling and processing the histories and experiences of survivors in the media, and likely your own as well. It feels personal when the Attorney General of the United States refuses to even acknowledge the survivors standing behind her. It reminds us of the hurtful responses to our own disclosures. It hits close to home when the way survivors’ stories are told revictimizes them. It retraumatizes all of us as we watch in distress. 

To be a survivor in this moment is painful and exhausting. It is watching public debates about whether it is “time to move on,” as though we do not live with the long-term impacts of abuse, while simultaneously scrutinizing us for inconsistencies that trauma itself produces. It is feeling the familiar tightening in our chests when powerful people close ranks.

For Jewish survivors, there is an added layer: the fear that speaking honestly about harm within Jewish spaces, or caused by Jewish people, will be weaponized by those within our communities and by antisemites. That double bind can silence even the most outspoken among us. But silence has a cost. It isolates us. It signals that communal belonging is conditional. It makes us feel that our safety matters less than the communal image. We know this because we have lived it.

You are not alone. Give yourself permission to turn off the news, choose not to read the article or listen to that podcast. And it is also okay if you feel the need to consume it all. But don’t consume it alone. As Mr. Rogers famously said, “Look for the helpers.” Find your helpers and let them support you. 

While these days we may feel broken, we implore you to remember that you are strongest at the broken places. Be kind to yourself – You deserve it. 

To the Jewish Community: 

While each case noted above is unique, the patterns in them are not. Epstein didn’t act alone. Pelicot’s husband didn’t act alone. The detention officer who crushed a young man’s testicles behaved that way because a system upheld his behavior. It is easy to paint individual perpetrators as monsters. But they all operate within a system of friends and enablers, as do we. 

It is normal not to know what to say when Jewish people are named in high-profile cases. It is also normal to be afraid to speak, especially if you are linked to them in any way. (Full disclosure: One of us was a Wexner Graduate Fellow from 2013-2017.) Shame may be the underlying feeling, and silence is often its byproduct.

Gisele Pelicot has correctly noted that “Shame has to change sides.” But it does not need to transfer to the community to which those who abuse belong. Silence, perhaps due in part to our shame by association, hurts survivors. They think we don’t see or stand with them. Silence signals that we are okay with the status quo – one that causes great harm. But communal silence is not an absence. It is a thick presence that sticks to survivors and weighs all of us down. 

Shame may also stem from the fact that, in big and small ways, we are bystanders to sexual violence. And inaction enables abuse. 

Sexual harm in the Jewish community is real, and Jewish survivors are impacted in myriad ways. Since the #MeToo Movement, we have had ample time to wrestle with the harm in our midst. We have made some progress, but survivors have been left wanting. We now have another opportunity for self-examination and moral reckoning to address the gaps that we neglected then. That begins with breaking our silence. 

Naming harm within our community is not betrayal. It is fidelity—to our Jewish values, to survivors, and to the truth. It is the first step to understanding what true pathways to accountability and teshuva look like, an area in which our communities continue to flounder. For harm-doers. For institutions and leaders who enabled them. And for ourselves. 

Every time we shift the focus from survivors to reputational harm or political allegiance to determine whose assault counts, we abandon our most basic commitments to human dignity – a lesson that was driven home post-October 7.

And while we reckon with sexual harm in the Jewish community, we can simultaneously reject that it is a Jewish problem. It is a human problem that takes root wherever power goes unchecked. The scandal is that powerful people across industries, nations, and faiths repeatedly evade consequences because bystanders and institutions protect them.

Silence feels safer. It avoids headlines. It minimizes conflict. It protects reputations.

But silence is not neutral. It is participatory.

We cannot undo what happened to the young girls exploited by Epstein, to Gisèle Pelicot, or to those assaulted on October 7. But we can insist that acknowledging sexual violence is not a political act but a moral one. We can insist that the dignity of survivors outweighs communal embarrassment.

We cannot force people to take active accountability; they must do so on their own. But we can create the conditions for that to happen and to understand our role in accountability, too.

Sexual violence decreases when accountability increases. Sexual harm stops when we have the courage to speak out against it. When we blow the whistle. When we act as capable upstanders. 

As survivors, we know what it costs to speak.

As criminologists, we know what it costs not to.

Silence is a system. And like any system, it persists only if we maintain it.

Dr. Alissa R. Ackerman is the owner of Ampersands Restorative Justice and Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at California State University, Fullerton. Dr. Guila Benchimol is the Director of Faith-Based and Community Accountability at Ampersands Restorative Justice. They work to establish robust, sustainable pathways for accountability, healing, and community repair through transformative processes between those who have been harmed and those who have caused harm.

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