When someone stopped Alejandro Palomas (55 years old) on the street, the encounter had always been friendly. “Sometimes there are people who recognize me because I am a writer [es autor de Una madre, Un perro y Un amor; la última novela le valió el premio Nadal en 2018] and it’s nice,” he says. At the end of January, she publicly recounted that she suffered sexual abuse at the Colegio de La Salle de Premià de Mar (Barcelona) in 1975, when she was eight years old. Since then, Palomas has become one of the main faces of the victims of pederasty in the Church in Spain, with multiple appearances in the media. On February 20, in Valencia, a woman recognized him on the street. She “She approached, lowered her mask and asked me with a smile if it was Alejandro Palomas. I nodded. Then she twisted her face and spat in my face: “You are lying sons of p.”, relates Palomas on Twitter.
The day before yesterday I was spat on in the street. She was a lady. In Valencia. On the way to the station. She approached, lowered her mask and asked me with a smile if I was Alejandro Palomas. I nodded. Then she twisted her face and spat in my face: “You are lying motherfuckers.”
👇 pic.twitter.com/ediffo1HtD– Alejandro Palomas (@Palomas_Alejand) February 22, 2022
“I just stood there not knowing what to do or say,” he continues. “I felt immense shame. And pity. And I went back to being the eight-year-old boy who gets punished for something he doesn’t understand. Without thinking, I picked up the phone and called my mother. I immediately understood that there would be no answer. My mother died a year ago. She is no longer her. I wiped my face with a tissue and entered the station once again that little orphaned Alejandro who sometimes doesn’t know how to look to the future”.
“I lived through the most unpleasant part of my life when I was little. This was not traumatic, but it was a shock”, indicates the writer. He has not suffered any other episode of these characteristics on the street, but he has suffered them on social networks. “They have written me very humiliating messages on Facebook. In all these years I’ve never had a bad experience and all of a sudden these moves come along,” he says. He assures that most of the messages he has received are “very positive”, but the negative ones “are also there”.
These experiences of Palomas, immediately after recounting that she suffered pederasty in the Church, respond to a pattern. It is very common for victims to suffer rejection from people who underestimate the importance of religious sexual abuse or simply deny its existence. “It’s very common,” explains psychologist Araceli Medrano, one of the professionals who treated a victim at the Gaztelueta school in Leioa. [el colegio del Opus Dei sigue defendiendo al abusador]. “The knee-jerk reaction, the structural step of abusers when accused, is denial.” As Medrano explains, this mechanism causes immediate damage to the victims: “They are forced to relive the abuse, since it forces them to show their surroundings that they have really suffered.” The story of pederasty in the Church, Medrano comments, “disrupts that hierarchy, threatens its power and the ascendancy it has over many people.” “It can lead to many even losing faith. For this reason, the greater the power of the institution within society, the more denial of that institution and its environment is produced”, adds the psychologist specializing in sexual abuse.
In the period in which most of the crimes documented by EL PAÍS occurred [al menos 611 casos y 1.246 víctimas, según la contabilidad que lleva este diario, la única existente ante la ausencia de datos oficiales], during the Franco regime and the first decades after, the power of the Church and its ascendancy in society were infinite. So much so that many victims have suffered rejection from their own families. “It took me a long time for my surroundings to believe me,” says Fernando García Salmones (61 years old), a victim of abuse at the Claret school in Madrid and one of the voices of the Stolen Childhood association. “When I told it, years after it happened, nobody gave it importance. They told me it would be a little thing. They treated me like a complainer.”
The power of García Salmones’ abuser in his community was immense: he was José María Pita da Veiga, a missionary who died in 2009 without assuming any guilt, a priest brother of a Franco Navy minister, Gabriel Pita da Veiga. “It caused me special pain that one of my brothers and his partner went to a tribute to this son-of-a-bitch priest, when he had already revealed the abuses. Then they apologized to me, but that opened my wound”, recalls this victim. “There are moments”, she continues, “in which the environment chooses not to be in solidarity with you, it is with the other. The message they send you is that they have done you a lot of harm, but that person or that institution has done them a lot of good.” There are still people around her who do not believe her or who think she says that they abused him “to gain popularity.”
Javier Paz, 50, a victim of pederasty at the hands of the priest Isidro López Santos, did not find that resistance in his family, but he did find it in a good part of his environment when he told it publicly In the diary Public and in an interview on La Sexta, in 2014. “The hate and rejection I have received is brutal. The worst was that of many of my neighbors, of the parish. They have come to spit on my mother at the door of the Church. Imagine the pain that caused me, I felt it was my fault. And she was even worse, thinking that she hadn’t protected me enough as a child. They asked my brother: How can your brother be doing this to the Church? He assures that walking around Salamanca, his hometown and where he suffered abuse, continues to cost him. “There are many healthy people who work to help us, but others continue to go wrong. They make you suffer with their looks and their threatening anonymous calls. For all this thousands of people will never speak, for fear of rejection and that they crucify you.
Also in Salamanca, Teresa Conde (56 years old), had no problem getting her family to believe her complaint: that the Trinidadian friar Domingo Ciordia Azcona abused her for two years since she was 14. “My word has not been questioned , but in my environment I have been asked to stop complaining”, says Conde. Recently, a co-worker of hers used the abuse she suffered as a teenager to verbally assault her. “Most of the victims eat this shit by themselves. When you tell it, you have the sword of Damocles, with the authority that the Church has, over you. I know victims who have not been able to avoid falling into drugs because they can’t find another way to calm down. I’ve had stages where I wanted to kill myself, just to get some relief.” Conde highlights the importance of “talking” about the trauma she experienced: “Silent, we suffer much more.”
The importance of telling
The reproaches that victims receive the most, “why are you telling it, don’t stir up the past, why didn’t you say it before”, are “a trap”, says the psychologist specializing in abuse. It is inconceivable from a social and justice point of view, but even less so from a “personal perspective”. “The lack of support in the environment can be more traumatic than the abuse itself. The reparation of the victims requires that they tell what has happened to them and that their testimony is not questioned. They take time to tell because it is very difficult to get out of the shock to suffer something like this as a child. Understanding what has happened to you is a very slow process, which you relate little by little”, says Medrano. When a victim of abuse does not receive this support, she suffers a “secondary victimization”, that is, “they reposition themselves as victims”. “The misunderstanding of others is reflected in them: it generates anxiety, depression, shame, self-esteem problems, guilt…”, adds Medrano. This process, the psychologist explains, occurs in other types of violence exerted on the victims from positions of power with social support: “Exactly the same thing happens with gender-based violence.. As we live in a macho society, women know that they can be singled out for denouncing, that their story will be doubted.
One of the greatest fears of Fernando Aguado, 59, a victim of abuse at the Jesuit school in Tudela (Navarra) at the hands of Pedro Ulacia, was the reaction that his surroundings would have when he told it. “What blocked me the most was the fear of what they would say. Mentally, I was prepared not to be believed,” he recounts. However, his entourage has welcomed his testimony without hesitation or attack. “It has helped me a lot. The support I have received has been overwhelming. For the victims this is very important.
That very positive reaction, Medrano indicates, is therapeutic: “The culture of support for victims is key. If this mindset takes hold, victims may switch to another condition. The reinforcement of society, personal or group therapy, is very important so that they can install themselves as non-victims. There will always be consequences, the psychological trauma will always be there, but you can be better. The psychologist believes that the wave of testimonies in recent weeks, based on the delivery of a dossier with 251 unpublished cases from EL PAÍS to the Vatican and the Episcopal Conference, is “a hopeful social moment.” “If the victims are accompanied, if they feel that they can take the step publicly, we will have advanced a lot,” she concludes.
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