<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Victims of childhood sexual abuse, too numerous to count, come in all religions, all nationalities, all ages, and all backgrounds.\u00a0 Childhood sexual abuse has no color or religious prejudice, targets no special income group, and plays favorite with neither male nor female.\u00a0 The lingering tragedy remains with its victims for life, no matter how many years of counseling, no matter what type of recovery program.\u00a0 With proper help the trauma is reduced, manageable, goes into that attic in our mind, the one we\u2019d rather never open.\u00a0 But there is always an unexpected trigger lurking, a chance comment, a familiar face, a resurrected glimpse of the past.\u00a0 We can learn to cope.\u00a0 We can learn to live again.\u00a0 We can even learn to be happy.\u00a0 The hyper-vigilance we lived with for years can become manageable.\u00a0 This is the good news for the victims of this epidemic trauma.\u00a0 What of the forgotten victims, the collateral damage?\u00a0 What is their good news?<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I am speaking of the enormous number of family members who lived with the actual victim, the mothers whose guilt grinds them into a never ending wall of grief, the fathers who agonize over what they could have done differently, the siblings who were both grateful and ashamed for not having been targeted themselves.\u00a0 Sometimes they are in more pain than the actual victim; it is less apparent.\u00a0 It manifests itself in subtle ways.\u00a0 After all, their answer to a therapist\u2019s or doctor\u2019s question, \u201cHave you ever been sexually molested?\u201d is \u201cNo\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In my particular case when my father entered my bedroom to rape me when I was 13, I had two sisters sleeping in the same room.\u00a0 One sister was a year younger than me and slept on the top bunk.\u00a0 She told me years later that she witnessed it and then the next day retracted her statement saying her husband told her that I\u2019d made it up.\u00a0 Since my father is the one who told me, not once but twice when I was in my mid thirties what he\u2019d done, I found my brother-in-law\u2019s assessment absurd.\u00a0 My father\u2019s comment at the time was, \u201cA lot of fathers and daughters have this kind of relationship.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t so bad; they do it in the Appalachian District all the time\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 No one more than I, wished I had made it up.\u00a0 I remembered the first time it happened.\u00a0 I wanted to be a nun and slept with a rosary in my hand.\u00a0 Someone was lying on top of me and doing something so horrible, so painful that all I could do was scream over and over for help.\u00a0 My mother was a heavy sleeper and by the time she entered my room my father had retreated to the hall, looking in, clutching his robe closed as I begged my mother to help me.\u00a0 She told me I\u2019d had a nightmare and no amount of sobbing and begging would change her mind.\u00a0 The next few years I developed amnesia, remembering only bits and pieces of what had happened.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My other sister was three years old and slept in a crib near our bunkbed.\u00a0 Jeanne was unable to talk clearly\u00a0until she was ten and wet the bed till that same age.\u00a0 A car accident took her life at the age of 25.\u00a0 The sister on the top bunk has become a bundle of neuroses, someone fearful to try anything, someone who sleeps as much as possible to avoid having to do battle with anything life presents, someone who recently underwent a double mastectomy for breast cancer.\u00a0 She often thinks I am my father and becomes hysterical and fearful of me.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I have two older brothers.\u00a0 The eldest has been an alcoholic all his life, and the other is so deeply imbedded in his Catholic faith that he is unwilling to do anything not written in stone in the Catholic religion.\u00a0 When I shared with them what my father had done, I was grateful that both not only believed me but also were strongly supportive of my recovery program.\u00a0 My alcoholic brother\u2019s response made me wonder if he\u2019d have been better off not knowing.\u00a0 He went into a rage, cursing and damming our father, and then proceeded to get drunk to deal with it.\u00a0 Within a short period after this, while having surgery for a hernia, his much damaged body began failing and he was put on a life support system.\u00a0 A call from the hospital told me it was only a matter of hours before he would die.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t die.\u00a0 At the writing of this article and is now one year sober.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My other brother, despite being an intelligent, sensitive, and well-read man, is judgmental in the extreme and as he has grown older turns more and more to the religion of his childhood, Roman Catholicism.\u00a0 Unfortunately, he has chosen a path not only of harsh judgments of others but his constant need for control has restricted some of the joy he might otherwise have in his life.\u00a0 Two marriages ended in divorce and his time is devoted to good works, religious ceremonies, and reading books, primarily on the Catholic faith.\u00a0 He is convinced that God has put him in this life to, as he puts it, \u201cset people straight\u201d.\u00a0 He does a lot of that and as a result has no friends left.\u00a0 He says, almost with confusion, that they all run when they see him coming.\u00a0 The only thing that has held him together, kept him from being suicidal, is his obsessive hold on his religion.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And what of the man who set all of this in motion, my father?\u00a0 Or did he? \u00a0It was not surprising to discover a few years ago a saying about my father’s father, “No woman is safe with that man.”\u00a0 This trauma is, after all, a multi-generational illness.\u00a0 Does this excuse my father?\u00a0 His role model was a womanizer, a man with no boundaries and no integrity in the matter of sex.\u00a0 No it doesn\u2019t.\u00a0 I too had a poor role model but I didn\u2019t become abusive.\u00a0 I became many things, promiscuous, insecure, suicidal, emotionally fragile and most important, a woman filled with shame.\u00a0 Because of that shame, I made many bad decisions.\u00a0 I too became a poor role model.\u00a0 But one thing I never became was abusive.\u00a0 Every single perpetrator is totally responsible for what he has done regardless of any abuse that happened to him as a child.\u00a0 They also are forgotten victims, often someone else\u2019s collateral damage but they are nonetheless child molesters.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The forgotten victims, collateral damage, unable to identify the source of their sorrow, cannot so easily resolve their childhood trauma.\u00a0 In the case of my mother, her denial was established at birth.\u00a0 She was the product of a generation who believed in the patriarchal system.\u00a0 Her motto about my father was, \u201cEven when he is wrong he is right.\u201d\u00a0 She lived and even died by that belief.\u00a0 When she found a lump in her breast after many years of marriage to my father, he convinced her that all doctors were quacks thereby denying her the medical care that might have saved her life.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If my brothers had been able to talk about the despairing and tormented household they grew up in their lives might have turned out different.\u00a0 If my sister who slept on the top bunk had spoken about what she witnessed and how she felt about it, she might not have lived an empty and fearful life, one where the result of her despair was breast cancer.\u00a0 All forgotten victims must tell their story. Can you imagine the burden this childhood sexual abuse puts on the family members who escaped?\u00a0 They know something is wrong, terribly wrong.\u00a0 Even if they are aware of the abuse that another family member suffered, they are confused as to how and why this impacts them.\u00a0 They have a thousand questions.\u00a0 What did I do wrong?\u00a0 Why did it not happen to me?\u00a0 What could I have done to have prevented it? What can I do to help the victim?\u00a0 Why do I feel so guilty?<\/em>\u00a0 We must help them as well as the actual victims.<\/p>\n