During the previous two Friday broadcasts of Oprah's "200 Men Come Forward About Sexual Molestation", the men made a number of comments about their sexual abuse that I felt were particularly noteworthy, in terms of my personal experience of sexual child abuse. As such, I will quote the statements and then expand upon them, with further examples and discussion.
"Worse than the abuse was not being believed by those we tell about the abuse." In part, I addressed this last week, when I asked "to whom can these men safely tell their story?" This is an incredibly important issue. My own experience was that, when I finally started to come to grips with my childhood incest (at around 40 years of age, which is the age Mike Lew in Victims No Longer says is the age at which many men come to realize their abuse), my mother refused to believe what I told her -- but then she was in denial about a lot of the childhood violence. One of my brothers believed me, because he had started to have memories of his own incest at the hands of our father. This is, apparently, the experience shared by a lot of males (and females) who were sexually abused by family members. Often, the abuse is a 'family secret', one which members may or may not know about, but to the extent that they do know, they often want to keep it 'quiet' and 'out of the public view'. Additionally, they may do little to intervene when it is occurring, in part out of a fear that intervention will only hurt themselves (by subjecting them to similar molestation or violence directed at them by the perpetrator), or a feeling that their efforts will bear little fruit in the family structure.
I talked with a fellow many years ago in whose family he was the subject of incredible physical violence from his father (he was an only child). His father, in fits of rage, would beat him bloody with a wire coat hanger, from the age of 9 until around 16, when he finally could take no more of it -- and was big enough to fight back. One day, when he was 16, he had the 'presence of mind' to hold his father's arms, and stop him from beating him. As his father was turning beet-red and straining to break the grip and continue the torture, his mother screamed at him to stop holding his father's arms 'because he might have a heart attack'. In other words, his mother had never done anything to stop the abuse in the past, and now that he had enough strength to stop the abuse, she was far more worried about the safety of her economic partner than about the safety and care of her child.
That was an intense point of clarity for this fellow, who realized that he had to get out of that house as quickly as possible, out into the world that had to be more safe than it was in his own home. This is the experience of boys who either are beaten and/or sexually molested in their own home by one or both of the parents: that, as unsafe as the 'outside world' may be, it has to be safer than what they are experiencing within the supposed safety of their own home. Not that it is, but the terror within the home is so over-the-top that anything else 'just has to be' better, or so they hope.
"You become 'the problem'; the shame says you 'asked for it'." This is a common dilemma faced by children. Since adults are supposed to be 'caregivers' and 'protectors', children naturally assume that if they are sexualized by adults, they must have unconsciously encouraged the behavior. And, of course, many perpetrators actively encourage this way of thinking, so that they can delude themselves into believing that the burden of the behavior will not fall on their shoulders.
The story told by the two brothers who were sexually abused by the parish priest -- who, as the abuse continued, forced the boys to have sex with each other and then invited his fellow priests to engage in gang-rape of the children -- exposed this lie in the 'full light of the day'. When they told their parents about it, at least at first no one believed them because, after all, the priest was a respected member of the community. They and the other men interviewed noted that the internalized shame 'told them' that they had 'asked for the abuse' -- when, of course, those of us who sit outside of the circumstance know full well that no child asks to be abused, not sexually, not physically, not emotionally. But shame is an insidious emotional culprit and it makes victims believe things which, though wholly untrue, make 'sense' within the terror they are experiencing. It is difficult for children to come to the realization that they weren't the cause of the abuse, but rather that the abuse was done to them by others. It serves the abusive interests of their perpetrators to encourage the children to believe that 'they are the problem', not the adult.
"When I was in the shower, I wanted to peel off my skin, given how horribly uncomfortable I was within my own skin." From my own abuse, I know this one well. I've spent a lifetime trying to feel any sense of comfort 'within my own skin'. The sexual abuse poisons an individual's comfort with their own body, and destroys a desire to continue 'in the bodily form that invited the abuse'. Boy children sometimes fantasize that if they only had been girls, they would not have been abused, but this is only the 'magical answer' to their bewilderment; girls sometimes have the alternate fantasy, that if they had only been boys, they would not have been molested. But, as we now know, many many children, of both sexes, are sexually abused on a regular basis by biological relatives, step-parents and step-siblings, sexual partners of single parents, babysitters, and complete strangers, and whatever is their sex-of-origin does not inhibit the desire of the perpetrators to abuse them.
It is the children's vulnerability that makes them 'desirable' in the eyes of the perpetrators. Many perpetrators are clumsy, inept, or socially immature and lack the skills needed to manifest sexual relations with other adults; hence, their 'sexual desires' are dysfunctionally directed toward children (often, as in the case of biological parents, their own children). For the children, the experience is sufficiently terrifying and shame-filled that they often end up wanting to be anyone, or anything, or anywhere else than who or where they are. And as they grow up, they are uncomfortable with their own bodies and quite uncomfortable when engaging in sexuality with other people, given their own intensely negative feelings about 'sex' or 'love-making' (especially given that many perpetrators say they 'love' the children and are 'making love to them').
Additionally, a child who has been sexually abused begins to question their own sexuality. Boys often feel like they 'must really be girls', because why else would their perpetrators have wanted to have intercourse [sodomy] with them? Whether they had homosexual or transsexual desires as children becomes rather problematic; being sexually abused doesn't make a child gay or a transsexual individual, because it is not sex -- it is abuse!
As Mike Lew notes in Victims No Longer (p. 41): Since men "are not supposed to be victims," abuse (and particularly sexual abuse) becomes a process of demasculinization (or emasculation). If men aren't supposed to be victims (the equation reads), then victims aren't men. The victimized male wonders and worries about what the abuse has turned him into. Believing that he is no longer an adequate man, he may see himself as a child, a woman, gay, or less than human -- an irreparably damaged freak.
As a result, the child is quite unclear whether later sexual desires toward members of their own sex-of-birth are 'natural' or 'abuse-driven' desires, especially when the abuse has occurred in infancy. On top of it all, if their sexual molestation and/or rape first occurred before the age of 2, the memories of the abuse are 'locked away' in a dissociative part of the memory that has no words attached to it, since children don't begin using full sentences until after that age.
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