Working the forgiveness shop

At one of those workshops yesterday designed to train about reporting rape and child sexual abuse. Always pretty gruelling.
Some off the top of my head observations.
Political correctness and evangelism
There is an orthodoxy here that is being aggressively promulgated. It includes such truths as "rape is not about sex it is about power"; "the perpetrators are always to blame"; "minors are never to blame"."society conspires to overlook these issues"
And, indeed, I accept most of this orthodoxy. Our group was patted on the head several times for giving the right answers. But occasionally I wondered when we were hurtling through volumes of information whether we were paying enough attention to the creeds that were being set before us.
We, for example, skipped over the three case studies in the notes...which was rather a pity since these often tend to draw out of people less doctrinal repsonse.
Sex and Power
The statement (as above) that rape is not about sex but about abuse of power...is one that increasingly gives me the heeby jeebies. It certainly is about the abuse of power, but it is also about sex. Are we overlooking here that there is something about male sexuality that is linked with power and the need to dominate, and instead of denying all the time that this is about sex do we need to be helping men to understand that sex and sexuality needs to be expressed rather differently than has been the accepted norm.
This requires teezing out and I don't fully understand the implications but it is worth thinking through.
Forgiveness and Revenge
It was interesting to us all, but not more so than to our two (more or less) sectarian presenters. That we got enlivened by the issue of forgiveness. This of course is our stock-in-trade and we have indeed thought about it more than most.
It was interesting, I thought, that one presenter (the less 'religious' of the two) saw this as an opportunity for further challenge and discussion while the more overtly "religious" one kept telling us that it was unhelpful to talk to victims about 'forgiveness' and see this as a goal.
Now I am the first to admit that we have a lot more thinking to do in this area, but it seems to me that there is no value in 'revenge' (even legal revenge?) at all and that Christianity will always want to move to forgiveness.
We misunderstand the cost of forgiveness, and in that sense trivialise it. It does not preclude justice and punishment, and indeed must not. But, to my mind this process will always be lacking unless genuine forgiveness is opened up.