Chosen Ignorance Quotes

“It was that culture of denial that allowed my abuse to take place to start with. Did you know that it wasn't until 1984 that the Department of Health added the category of "sexual abuse" to its list of harms that can befall children? When I was being raped and made pregnant at the age of 11, it wasn't just my own dissociative process that told me that it wasn't happening; it was society too. "We don't have a category for that. Computer says no."͏”
― Carolyn Spring, Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices

“I feel that some people have a hard time with the truths around us, not only the sexual abuse by priests, but all bad things. I call it chosen ignorance. This modified form of ignorance is found in people who, if confronted with certain truths realize that they have to accept them and thereby acknowledge evil, and that scares them. Opening up and letting the truth in might knock them off their perceived center. It is too hard, period.”
― Charles L. Bailey Jr., In the Shadow of the Cross: The True Account of My Childhood Sexual and Ritual Abuse at the Hands of a Roman Catholic Priest

“When faced with the specter of hundreds of clinicians diagnosing thousands of multiple personality cases in the 1980s-when in the 1970s there were but a few dozen cases, and before that, many years separated individual case reports - skeptics who have not followed the development of the field closely have naturally been suspicious. But instead of following up on their suspicions, many have resorted to authoritarian rhetorical denial... I have overheard grumbling private conversation in my many travels to professional meetings which translate generically into "they are all dupes," referring to clinical researchers in the field.
What, one might ask, does that make of those who have written off the research without reading it?”
― George B. Greaves