The inability of people to recognize and name child sexual abuse for what it is has been much written about. Every time this subject is brought up and strongly addressed it does a little more to stop incest and child sexual abuse. I had always thought that people who were never abused themselves were the ones who didn’t want to hear about it. If you don’t look at something, it doesn’t exist. Society has several taboo subjects and child sexual abuse heads up the list. But the truth is that victims themselves make up a large number of those who don’t want to hear about it. I understand. I understand so well. Don’t talk about Aunt Sarah who used to get drunk at all the family gatherings and come on sexually to all the men. Don’t mention the ugly argument your mom and dad had in front of you. When dad struck mom in the face and she fell to the floor, look the other way. When Uncle Harold came to visit and he sexually assaulted me as I lay sleeping, it didn’t really happen or at least that’s what my mom would say if I told her.
Many years ago when I was married to my first husband I was at his parent’s home along with my sister-in-law. My father in law was drunk. He usually was drunk. My mother-in-law was a kind, loving person. We were all seated at the table and my father-in-law asked his wife to do something. She didn’t do it fast enough, or maybe he just didn’t like what she was wearing. All I know was he stood up, slugged her in the face and she fell to the floor as her glasses went flying. I was shocked. I had never seen a man hit his wife. My sister-in-law helped her mother off the floor and said in a gentle and pleading tone, “Dad you shouldn’t have hit mom.” And that was the end of it. Everyone acted as if this didn’t happen. Many years later I told one of my daughters about it and she shared it with one of her aunts who had not been in her mom’s house at the time. She told my daughter, “That never happened.” My daughter believed her and all I could think of was, she wasn’t even there. How could she know that it didn’t happen?” So now I’m branded to my own daughter as a liar, an accusation I don’t take lightly.
To me it was such a clear illustration of “pretending that never happened.” How many times have fathers raped their daughters and when mom finds out or the siblings find out they immediately pretend it didn’t happen. How many women have been sexually assaulted by their husband and then pretended it never happened. I know because this happened to me. It is against the law to rape your wife. I didn’t know that at the time but I doubt if I’d have acted any differently. I just pretended it didn’t happen, over and over and over. When I was losing my mind from the continual brutal sexual assaults I still pretended it didn’t happen.
People who consider themselves honest and mature making only wise decisions will become blind when they hear their teenage daughter crying because grandpa chased her around the house, pulled her blouse up and played with her breasts. Mom is pretending it didn’t happen. When she was thirteen he did it to her too and her mom told her it didn’t happen. Her sisters were sexually assaulted by this “dirty old man” and they pretended it didn’t happen. I know because this teenage girl was my best friend.
How can we force society to see what is going on. How can we yank them out of their delusions that it never happened. So many people are disgusted and revolted by the subject of child sexual abuse. Along with that is sex trafficking, an enormous problem in today’s culture. I’ve had friends angry with me for continuing to write about child sexual abuse and incest. I have a cousin who became angry at me a few years back when I wouldn’t do what she told me. She wanted me to quit writing books about recovery from incest and child sexual abuse. She wanted me to stop trying to find people who wanted to join the Lamplighter Movement. She told me to put it behind me. Get over it! I also had a friend who asked me one time how old I was when my sexual abuse began. When I told her I was thirteen her response was, “If you had been a little child it would be a problem but because you were thirteen it wasn’t a big deal”. The sister-in-law who told my daughter her dad had never hit her mother also made the comment to me regarding my own abuse, “It’s only the one time so that’s not a problem.” When I told her it wasn’t just one time; it was five years of sexual abuse and beatings, she turned her back on me. Obviously the subject was over.
What is wrong with people? Those who refuse to recognize and do something about child sexual abuse are living in so much denial, as if they are in a cave. How can we drag people out of their blindness and get them to, not only recognize what is happening, but validate to the victim that it is real. To turn your back on child sexual abuse is to diminish or dismiss it. That is so wrong. During the early days of World War II people refused to believe that Hitler was killing millions of Jews. During World War II Roosevelt had thousands of Japanese American rounded up against their will and forced them to live in internment camps. A few years back I read a first person account of someone who lived in those camps along with his family. They lost everything, their homes, their personal property, their businesses. People pretended it wasn’t happening. To view a problem with clarity makes it real. Most people don’t like reality. Most people don’t want to know about the Jewish concentration camps, the internment of Japanese Americans, sex trafficking and other forms of child sexual abuse.
We need to stand together and recognize child sexual abuse for what it is. By ignoring it we are ignoring the shame that victims went through, the shame that still haunts them years later. That shame kills so many lives and destroys thousands of others.
Below are excerpts from my book Repair Your Life, 2nd edition regarding shame.
Wounded to their very soul, if not treated, an incest victim either stumbles through a life of despair or dies from it. The tragedy of incest is that, unlike a physical wound, the aftermath can spread to the children, who in turn are either sexually abused or begin a lifetime of unhealthy choices, the direct result of a poor self-image created from shame. Guilt is the driving force that causes this shame and erodes our self-esteem.
The shame of what we have become and the behavior we use to hide it grows and is stuffed into closets in our mind. We lean our bodies against the door and turn a deaf ear to the screams that come every time we open it to hide another piece of shame. For most of us, somewhere between our late thirties and late forties, the closets in our mind fill to overflowing and we hit what Twelve Steppers call our “bottom.” It is as if our life were on a course of self-destruction, one we have no ability to veer away from as we aim directly for the inevitable, unhappy endings in most areas of our lives.
This is the cross that child sexual abuse victims must bear. If they must bear it why can society not help them at least to carry their cross by recognizing what they have gone through? If we can recognize that; if we can validate that, there is a chance that they no longer have to carry a cross.
But I fear that will never happen because, none is so blind as he who cannot see.
