Telling is a start
Child abuse victims speak out
By David Perez
"Transformation of silence into language and
action is an act of self revelation that always seems
fraught with danger... But, most of all I think we fear the
very visibility without which we also cannot truly live ... and
that visibility which makes us the most vulnerable is that
which is also the source of our greatest strength."
--Audre Lorde
Anna walked up to the podium and stared out into the
audience. Her eyes had a haunted look.
"I'm a survivor of childhood incest and torture," she said.
"I survived but I know three others who didn't."
Anna asked for a moment of silence for "those who committed
suicide or were killed, for those whose final cries were only
heard by their abuser."
The roomful--75 people, mostly women--closed their eyes and
grew quiet. A few wept.
I was in Bethesda, Md., near Washington, attending a "To
Tell The Truth" conference on child sexual abuse. Held on Nov.
8, the event was sponsored by One Voice: The Alliance for Abuse
Awareness; Abuse Survivors Know, Inc.; and Rite of TRUTH
Memorial. Survivors of child sexual abuse organized the
conference and spoke and performed at it.
The event was uplifting even as it addressed a deadly
serious issue. One woman performed a dramatic one-act piece;
another read stirring poetry. An elderly woman did a dance to
an Elton John song--"Recover Your Soul"- that was as
exhilarating as it was devastating.
Each in her own way spoke to the conference's theme: that
when it comes to a crime like child abuse, especially of a
sexual nature, telling is a start.
Breaking the silence
In her powerful book "Trauma and Recovery," psychotherapist
Dr. Judith Herman wrote: "The ordinary response to atrocities
is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the
social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the
meaning of the word unspeakable."
Dr. Herman's book links domestic and sexual violence to war,
prisons and concentration camps as areas where unspeakable
atrocities occur.
Child sexual abuse has its own specific horror. As the
conference participants made clear, this is a terror that often
takes place in the "safety" of one's own home, where love and
nourishment is supposed to be the norm. That this assault takes
place at such an early age makes this type of abuse all the
more gut-wrenching.
The facts speak for themselves:
* Approximately one in four to five girls and one in seven
to nine boys will be sexually abused by the age of 18.
* According to the U.S. Department of Justice, approximately
31 percent of women in prison say they were abused as children.
About 95 percent of teenaged prostitutes have been sexually
abused.
* Reported cases of child sexual abuse reached epidemic
proportions, with a reported 322 percent increase, from 1980 to
1990.
As terrible as the above facts are, however, the conference
highlighted the fact that abuse survivors and their supporters
are not just victims. They're speaking out and fighting
back.
Keynote speaker Elizabeth Morgan, M.D., Ph.D., is a
remarkable case in point. She received her M.D. at Yale Medical
School and was the medical columnist for Cosmopolitan magazine
from 1973 to 1980. An accomplished cosmetic surgeon with a
practice in Washington, Morgan got married and had a daughter.
Then her nightmare began.
Her husband became violently abusive. He attacked her and
sexually assaulted their young daughter. Morgan left him and
took her daughter. The husband wanted visitation rights, but
Morgan insisted they be supervised.
The matter was taken to court. There she encountered a
family court system "so evil I couldn't believe it."
The judge literally told her that "no matter how persuasive"
testimony of the father's abuse of the daughter was, he would
rule in support of unsupervised visitations--which he did.
Morgan had discovered that the U.S justice system is terribly
biased against women and children, a "reflection of this
society's values," as she put it.
Capitalist values are in fact the heart of the problem. It
can be summed up in two words: private property. Women and
children have long been relegated to the status of property,
both in the home and in society as a whole. This status is
itself the result of centuries of patriarchal relations and
class divisions, the twin engines of oppression.
When the sexual child abuse began again, Morgan refused to
comply with the court order. She was jailed. In prison she
"gained strength from the other women inside, almost all poor,
who were courageous in the face of incredible odds." Her case
eventually received national attention and she was released
after two years.
The personal is political
Dr. Elizabeth Morgan's experience shows the continuing
validity of the slogan made popular by the women's liberation
movement of the 1960s and early 1970s: The personal is
political.
The feminist movement exposed crimes such as child abuse and
empowered those previously silenced into submission. In fact,
the very study of the phenomenon owes its existence to struggle
and resistance. This holds true for the sexual abuse of young
boys also.
Judith Herman wrote: "The systematic study of psychological
trauma depends on the support of a political movement. Indeed,
whether such study can be pursued or discussed in public is
itself a political question [that] becomes legitimate only in a
context that challenges the subordination of women and
children."
The presence of these brave women at the conference
confirmed that despite the current difficult political period,
abuse victims refuse to be silent. Their collective spirit and
determination demonstrated that while silence equals death,
words and action equal liberation.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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