When Harm Travels Through Trust: What the Amman Case Reveals About Power, Care, and Accountability

When cases of sexual violence against children become public, societies often move quickly towards shock, naming, exposure, and demands for punishment. This is understandable. The alleged assault of children demands legal accountability, institutional seriousness, and social refusal. It should never be minimised, blurred, or absorbed into ordinary scandal.

But if our response stops at outrage, we learn too little.

Recent reports from Amman describe the arrest of a man accused of sexually assaulting three minors inside his home. According to public statements reported in Jordanian media, the Family Protection Department received a report concerning alleged sexual assaults against three minors; their families filed formal complaints; and the suspect was referred to the Public Prosecutor of the Grand Criminal Court and detained pending investigation.

The case has raised widespread public anger. It has also raised a more difficult set of questions: how did an adult reportedly gain access to children through social trust? How did professional self-presentation, media visibility, youth-facing activity, and public familiarity combine to produce legitimacy? What forms of power were at work before the alleged assaults became visible? And what would an accountable response require beyond the prosecution of one person?

These questions do not replace criminal accountability. They deepen it.

The issue is not only what one person is alleged to have done. The issue is how trust was produced, circulated, and insufficiently governed.

Harm rarely arrives as harm

One of the most difficult realities in cases of exploitation and assault is that harm often travels through socially valued language: care, mentorship, opportunity, support, expertise, inspiration, protection, treatment, service, development.

This matters because the language surrounding an adult can become part of the infrastructure that grants them access. A person who appears on television, gathers followers, speaks confidently, presents themselves as a professional, attends events, forms a youth initiative, and performs public concern may come to be seen as safe before any serious structure has made them accountable.

This is not a call for suspicion towards every adult who works with young people. It is a call to stop confusing familiarity with safety.

Children and families should not be left to distinguish alone between care and performance, between qualified expertise and self-branding, between public recognition and verified responsibility. Where adult access to children is involved, trust must be organised through structures: clear boundaries, documented procedures, independent reporting channels, supervision, credential verification, risk assessment, and consequences for violations.

Good intentions are not a safeguarding system.

All adult-child sexual harm is also an abuse of power

In public debates, language matters. Words such as “relationship”, “mistake”, “misconduct”, or “scandal” can hide the structure of violence when children are involved.

Where minors are concerned, sexual acts cannot be analysed through the language of mutuality. The adult-child relation is already marked by power: age, knowledge, mobility, economic capacity, social authority, physical access, and emotional influence. If the adult also has public visibility, professional claims, institutional access, or a reputation for helping young people, that power becomes layered.

The reported facts of the Amman case therefore require us to read the alleged assaults not only as sexual violence, but also as exploitation: the misuse of power, status, access, and trust for harm.

This distinction matters because it shifts the analysis from individual pathology to social conditions. It asks how the alleged perpetrator became credible. It asks what forms of authority attached to him. It asks who could question him, who could not, and why.

Power is not only a title

A narrow view of power looks only for formal position: manager, official, teacher, doctor, director, parent. But many forms of power operate without formal appointment.

Social power can come from reputation, class, gender, age, appearance, public admiration, and perceived respectability.

Knowledge power can come from professional language, medical claims, expertise, credentials, or the performance of expertise.

Emotional power can come from charisma, charm, admiration, dependency, gratitude, affection, or the ability to make others feel seen.

Relational power can come from connections with institutions, media figures, families, public officials, celebrities, or community actors.

Material power can come from control over space: a private home, a car, a clinic, an office, a camp, a trip, a closed room.

Digital power can come from platforms, followers, visibility, and the ability to shape reputation quickly.

In cases involving children, these forms of power may overlap. A person does not need to hold a formal institutional position in order to exercise authority. Sometimes, authority is produced through atmosphere: the sense that everyone already trusts this person, that questioning them would be awkward, that their public image is evidence enough, that their access has already been socially approved.

That is precisely why safeguarding cannot rely on reputation.

Media is part of the trust economy

Media organisations often imagine themselves as observers of public life. But they also produce public legitimacy.

When someone is repeatedly invited, featured, interviewed, platformed, or presented as an expert or role model, the media is not merely reflecting their status. It is helping create it. Audiences read media presence as endorsement, even when no formal endorsement is intended.

This places ethical responsibility on media institutions, producers, presenters, editors, and digital platforms. Before amplifying adults who work with children, claim professional expertise, or build public authority through youth-facing activities, media actors must ask basic questions: what has been verified? What qualifications are being implied? What forms of access might this visibility create? Who bears the risk if the person being platformed misuses the legitimacy we helped produce?

This is not about blame-shifting from the accused to the media. It is about recognising that legitimacy is relational. It is made between people and institutions. Once made, it can be used.

Media due diligence is therefore not only a professional standard. It is a safeguarding obligation.

Professional self-presentation must be verifiable

The public discussion has also raised questions about professional titles and specialist claims. When professional bodies later clarify whether someone is or is not registered in a particular speciality, that clarification is important. But it also reveals a deeper problem: ordinary people are often expected to verify complex professional distinctions in systems that are not always accessible, visible, or easy to navigate.

This burden should not fall only on families, patients, or young people.

If a person can publicly benefit from the authority of a title, then the systems governing that title must be publicly legible. Professional associations, licensing bodies, media institutions, clinics, event organisers, and public platforms all have responsibilities here. Verification should not be an afterthought that appears only after harm has allegedly occurred.

Professional language can protect. It can also conceal. It can reassure families, silence doubt, and create proximity. When attached to beauty, medicine, youth, self-confidence, or care, it can become particularly powerful.

Titles should clarify accountability, not shield people from scrutiny.

Youth initiatives cannot operate on trust alone

One of the most troubling aspects of the public discussion is the reported connection between the accused and youth-facing social activity. Whether formal or informal, any initiative involving children and young people must be governed by clear safeguarding rules.

This includes recreational trips, camps, mentorship activities, private outings, educational support, charity initiatives, psychological support spaces, and youth leadership programmes. The more informal the initiative, the greater the risk that relationships will be governed by personal judgement rather than protective procedure.

At minimum, any work involving minors should answer the following questions before activities begin:

Who has access to children, and on what basis?

How are adults vetted?

Are one-to-one meetings allowed, and under what conditions?

Are private homes ever acceptable activity spaces?

Who supervises trips, transport, overnight stays, and informal gatherings?

How are complaints received?

Can children report safely without going through the adult they are concerned about?

Do families know the rules?

Are digital communications between adults and minors regulated?

What happens if concerns emerge before they become formal complaints?

These questions are not bureaucratic. They are the difference between trust as feeling and trust as protection.

Public outrage must not become spectacle

In cases of sexual violence, public anger can help break silence. It can challenge impunity. It can make denial harder. But it can also become harmful when it turns survivors’ experiences into content.

Children who have been subjected to sexual violence do not owe the public their stories. Their families do not owe society detail, performance, visibility, or explanation. Circulating names, recordings, rumours, identifying information, or speculative narratives can cause further harm, even when motivated by solidarity.

The first obligation is protection.

Protection includes privacy. It includes emotional and psychological safety. It includes legal care. It includes reducing exposure to stigma, retaliation, bullying, and public intrusion. It includes recognising that each child and family may experience the harm differently and may need different forms of support.

A survivor-centred response is not measured by how loudly society condemns the accused. It is measured by whether those harmed are protected from being harmed again.

Punishment matters. It is not enough.

There is a clear place for criminal accountability. Where crimes are committed, legal systems must investigate seriously, protect survivors and witnesses, and impose consequences according to due process.

But punishment alone does not repair the conditions that made harm possible.

A punishment-centred response can create the impression that society has acted once one person is removed. This is rarely true. If the systems that enabled access remain unchanged, if media platforms continue manufacturing legitimacy without verification, if youth initiatives continue operating without safeguarding structures, if professional titles remain difficult to verify, if families remain dependent on reputation, and if children lack safe reporting channels, then the conditions of harm remain available.

The question is not whether the alleged perpetrator should be held accountable. The question is who else must become accountable for changing the environment that allowed trust to be misused.

Accountability is not only a legal event. It is a social practice.

What must change

The Amman case should prompt a serious public reckoning across sectors.

Media organisations should develop clear due diligence procedures before platforming individuals as experts, mentors, social actors, youth supporters, or public role models.

Professional associations and licensing bodies should make verification of credentials simple, public, and accessible.

Youth initiatives should adopt written safeguarding procedures before engaging children, even if they are informal, volunteer-led, charitable, or community-based.

Schools, families, civil society organisations, clubs, and event organisers should stop relying on reputation as a proxy for safety.

Digital platforms and influencers should recognise that visibility creates authority, and that authority can create access.

Public institutions should ensure that reporting pathways are safe, confidential, child-sensitive, and known before crises occur.

Communities should learn to treat early discomfort, informal concerns, and unclear complaints as signals requiring attention, not as gossip, exaggeration, or reputational threat.

And all institutions working with children should understand that safeguarding is not a policy document. It is the everyday governance of power, relationships, access, information, emotion, and responsibility.

Beyond scandal

The language of scandal individualises harm. It makes the case about one person’s alleged monstrosity, one public fall, one shocking revelation. But justice requires a wider frame.

The alleged assaults in Amman should not be understood only as a story of individual violence. They should be read as a warning about how easily societies can mistake visibility for credibility, charity for care, professional language for qualification, and public admiration for accountability.

This does not mean that trust should disappear. Children and young people need trustworthy adults. Families need supportive institutions. Communities need people who work with care, seriousness, and responsibility.

But trust must be protected from manipulation.

That protection requires structures. It requires naming harm accurately. It requires analysing power even when power appears soft, charismatic, helpful, or respectable. It requires media and institutions to accept responsibility for the legitimacy they help produce. It requires complaint mechanisms that children and families can actually use. It requires survivor-centred support that does not turn pain into public performance.

Above all, it requires us to stop asking only how one person allegedly caused harm, and to begin asking how so many forms of trust were allowed to gather around him without enough accountability.

The responsibility now is not only to follow the case.

It is to build the conditions in which children are not asked to rely on appearances of safety where real protection should already exist.

For organisations, initiatives, and institutions seeking to strengthen their safeguarding systems, CTDC provides advisory, diagnostic, and learning support to help translate principles of care, accountability, and protection into practical governance, policies, and everyday practice.