i feel so sorry for you and can't believe what happened to you.
For them not to believe you is truly horrible.
hi, I'm claire, im 38 and me and my partner have just ended. A 3 year relationship which was my longest. I was sexually abused by my father too, I cannot remember everything, i know it stopped around 14 but i feel it started when i was a toddler. My mom confirmed "he played with me funny". I did the right thing and told my mother initially, she did confront my dad but he said i must have dreamt it an my mother found it easier to bury it (my father was also abusive to her). I did eventually tell a teacher at school when i was 14. Social services got involved, myself and my sister were examined, my sister was angry with me for being examined and my mother, out of fear, was angry with me for telling the school. I was just scared.
Social Services were very poor at that time and basically as i was unable to draw what he did to me it got dismissed, i didn't even understand my vagina at that time with no real sex education so i was able to explain what he did to me. He came home the same day that i told the school. He was supposed to stay away but came back. I don't think that will ever leave me. My mother told me not to say anything so i didn't and that was that. H didn't abuse me again he went on to abuse my sister too.
My mom struggled with it she had 6 kids, no money and my father was abusive. She coed by cleaning and blocked it all out.The abuse effected all of my relationships with my family, my mother, sisters and brother and it still does. i became 'the trouble maker that got social services involved' , i rebelled as i thought no one cared for me, and unfortunately we are still not that close, i am hurt that they don't get how it has effected me, but also i understand it has effected them all too differently.
I became a prostitute at the age of 17 and a drug/alcohol user, i didn't give a sh*t about anything or anyone, including myself. Self harmed from the age of 13....and still regretfully do when im struggling. At 26 I found yoga, i did begin to sort myself out and find a good career and became a probation officer, i now teach yoga .......... but i still struggle with relationships profoundly.
Sexual abuse in childhood, isn't child sexual abuse i feel thats its life abuse because the cycle of abuse doesn't stop, the ffects are so ongoing that it really can destroy the person who you were meant to be. I find people just don't get how much it destroys your ability to trust, form good relationships and have healthy self esteen. I run from one one relationship to another, never letting myself get too close. If i do fall in love i become a neorotic maniac so angry, spiteful, unable to trust, and eventually i have to ask them to go because i don't like the person i become when i am in a relationship. My self esteem and confidence is low when in relationships and I seem to cope better single.
I have just started seeing a counsellor (ive only had 4 sessions) she is a specific counsellor for sexual abuse and rape (i went to my doctors and he referred - its free) i did try psychotherpay once for 9 months but £60 hour is a lot of money for long term counselling and to be fair i think the specific counsellor for childhood sexual abuse is better.
I think its important you seek specific sexual abuse and rape counselling as they do get you!!! they also don't tell you what you should do, she helps me make my own decisions and trust myself with them. She helped me find the courage to split from my partner, it just wasn't working for me and i felt i was getting worse - more angry, drinking and becoming isolated.
I would advise anyone to go down the counsellor route if you can, i use to confide in a friend but 20 years on i think she deserves a bit of a break from it. Unless someone has gone through similar or they are a professional sexual abuse and rape counsellor i just don't really think people get it and why should they.
Also, try yoga. This is what helped me sort things out at the age of 26 and i continued it. Yes i do still have problems, but they are not on the scale thy once were before i started yoga. it does help you have faith and does create healing. It will bring emotions up onto the surface but this is good, rather than have them buried, also the counsellor advised me to use a journal - which i am and I work through my thoughts/feelings with her.
I call my now ex boyfriend, we are still friends, my 'trigger angel' because that was what he was. He triggered just about every button in me, but it made me finally accept 'this is my sh*t' i need to work this stuff out properly. I'm nearly 40 its time for me to find me.
I will get there, but we don't have to do it alone and its okay that we are angry etc etc. We have to accept we are angry (number one) and stop blaming other people (we become very good at this) or things around us, it is linked to the abuse and has to be worked through. Also, find something to get the anger out that isn't distructive to you, along with counselling, anything that makes you feel good. Recognise what people make you feel good, if you hang out with mates who are all down on men it won't help you move on, your best mates are also the ones that help confront whats really going on.
As for the men (and women) out there that do this, its a hard one. My dad was abused by my grandad and i think he was such a mixed up bloke (and most likely had all the stuff going on in his head that he put in mine). Child abuse fooked him up too and i do hope now he has passed away he is at peace.
But i will share something, you have to forgive, as this allows you to start to let go. All this anger we hold on to against our perpetrators allows the abuse to continue in our own heads. When we are busy hating them we don't see whats going on with us. Forgive is actually a selfish act AS IT ALLOWS YOU TO START TO FEEL BETTER OR AT LEAST START TO RECOVER.
Society has allowed childabuse to go on for centuries, it is linked to the sexualisation of both women and children and power of men, and if you read up on some conspiracy theories it is also suggested it was created to basically keep us all fooked up so we don't recognise whats really going on...... Its not a easy subject or one that is easily explained. But i do beleive there are good guys out there, and for those of you that are mothers to sons and daughters, or we can do is try and teach our kids about love and respect in relationships.
I wish you all well and hope maybe this helps in some way x
Its not fair and it's wrong, speak out, before it's too late.
This reply is directed to Njoynlife, regarding your post that starts with......
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I've only just stumbled on this post today & have spent a couple of hours going through everyone's accounts of sexual abuse. I've found it extremely interesting, albeit heartbreaking too.
I come from a family of pedophiles; my maternal grandfather, who abused at least 6 children (that we know of, but more we think), one uncle (E) who is currently known to the police as a potential danger to pre-pubescent girls (but hasn't actually been charged with an offence) and another uncle (K) who was accused (but not charged) of molesting my cousin.
My mum was a victim of my grandfather. The abuse started at around age 4 and continued in to her teens. He also abused others in family, including the boys (although, it's not known whether he abused E, but we know he abused K, as well as another uncle, G).
Growing up, I was aware of what our family legacy was; my mother told me at around 7 or 8 about what had happened to her & then explained it more when I was about 11. The grandfather was dead by this time, but I was sworn to secrecy because my grandmother was still alive. With my mother, the effects of her abuse are more so in her relationships with men & not in her day to day living. She was a promiscious teen, but then once she married my step-father- she was the dutiful wife. However, when he died, she became celibate & a little bit of a man-hater. My mum's a real fighter- she's had severe health problems since she was a child (tumours, skin conditions, osteoperosis (?) & arthritis- among a few things!)- and as far as she's concerned, she wasn't going to let that b*&$£^ take her life away from her, when he already had her childhood.
I think her strength lay in her siblings. Her and her older brother (G) & sister were all aware that the others were suffering, so they took solace in each other and are still close today.
There's also my son's cousin, who was abused from around age 4-7 years old by her mum's best friend's son, who was her babysitter. She's only 9 now, but there are certain signs in her behaviour that she has been abused. It feels yukky writing it, but she 'flirts' with adults; she becomes very over-familiar with them & touchy feely, without knowing them. Yet she has absolutely no confidence in herself; on a visit last year, she told me that she thought she was "ugly" and she didn't like her skin (she has exema). It was on that visit that she told me what "her brother" (as she called him) had done to her. She said "he had been trying to make a baby" with her.
It broke my heart, listening to her. I wanted to cry; I want to hug her, yet at the same time I wanted to run the couple of hundred miles to his mother's house and break his f*&^%$ neck.
But....at the same time, I couldn't help wondering what had happened to him to make him do what he did. He was a 13year old boy and I have absolutely no doubt that he was also a victim of abuse. Not surprisingly, he had been suspended from school not long before his victim spoke out. His 'crime'? Sexually insulting a girl at school & exposing himself.
In the case of my son's cousin, I can see future issues- more so because of the way the abuse occured & the way her mother reacted to signs that were obvious. What I mean by that is that my son's cousin (let's call her Rosie) approached her mother prior to speaking out. She told her mother that this boy had been kissin her on the mouth, yet her mother ignored it & still let him carry on babysitting. When her mother told me on the phone what Rosie had said, I instantly told her to talk to her & ask if anything else had happened. But she brushed it off & claimed that "blah-blah was a good boy- he wouldn't do that kind of thing".
Less than 3 months later, she was called in to the school & was met by a police officer & a social worker......
The boy wasn't prosecuted, despite Rosie being believed & everything going through the proper channels, she was deemed too young to give an accurate account of the abuse. He was moved away, yet still- to this day- her mother is best mates with his mother & the boy drops home occasionally.
Myself- I was sexually attacked- not abused- when I was 10 years old by a friend of my uncle E's on a swimming trip. The boy was in his mid to late teens (16-18) & threatened to kill me if I didn't co-operate. To show me he was serious, several times he held my head under water & pushed it in to his crotch. He was goaded on by my uncle E, who kept telling me to lighten up and not take it too seriously. I didn't tell anyone- mostly because I felt as if it was my fault. I had fancied the boy a little, yet at that age I hadn't even kissed a boy, nevermind thought about sex with one!
I repressed it; I had other issues to deal with a few years later and from then on, it wasn't something that was prevalent in my mind, so I can honestly say that it didn't affect me psychologically. I didn't even talk about it until a few years ago, mostly because I didn't see it as a major thing. The only thing I don't like is my hair being wet & I'm not keen on going swimming. Once my hair gets heavy with water, I feel as if I'm suffocating. Last year, I was talking to a friend about sexual abuse & I had my bit of a break-down- I think more so because I was over-empathising with Rosie's experience, yet the two were completely different.
I didn't have a pro-longed abuse experience; it happened once & wasn't repeated. I even recall seeing the boy again afterwards & telling him I'd slit his throat, if he did it again. He was quite taken aback by this and didn't approach me again. I wasn't a passive child & my mother's accounts of her childhood had served me well, I suppose.
I also read another post on here about someone being abused by a friend roughly the same age as them. That happened to me too, but I didn't regard it as abuse. It was my 1st sexual experience & I kept going back for more. It was never pressured, but she always took the lead. That started when I was about 8 and went on until we were teenagers.
I think there are many factors to consider when estimating the long-term effects of abuse. How long it went on for, who the abuser was & what tactics they used to coherce or threaten the child. There is also other issues; the relationship with their other family members/careers, their general background & the personality of the child.
However, you also hit on a very valid point about how the act of child sexual abuse is seen by society and/or the culture of the child involved.
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I think you have to consider how morals and ethics have changed over time to answer this question, and additionally, how the lifespan of humans has changed. Thousands of years ago, the lifespan of a human being would have been their mid-twenties, at best; thus childhood was not a childhood. It was; breed as soon as you can to ensure the survival of the human race.
So no, I don't think there would have been much of an issue about child abuse at that time. Yet this is not two thousand years ago; we don't have an urgency to breed before we die in our twenties and man is supposed to be civilised and be able to exert such a thing as control over their behaviour. This comes with an expanding frontal lobe. To try and compare the behaviour of cavemen & animals to modern humans is not necessarily biologically sound; modern humans are quite different in the way that they 'think'- we have higher cognitive functions, for a start.
I think one of the best approaches to take when looking at the issue of sexual abuse is the societal one.
There used to be an old adage- Children should be seen and not heard. So while the child was possibly suffering, it wasn't going to shout out or share, because it wouldn't have been believed. Additionally, most victims of sexual abuse are women & as I think we all know- women were not exactly regarded as bonefide members of society until a little less than a century ago.
And as for male victims , they STILL have a hard time being able to talk about abuse. Despite our New Age Man society, there still holds the same stereotypes that men are meant to 'deal with things' without creating a drama.
As for children in general- they were little understood or regarded until around the same time as women.
I don't necessarily think that this psychological destruction is a recent phenomenon- I simply think that children have finally been told they are allowed to speak up. And with that permission, so can the adults who are still very much helpless children in their minds.
Over the past hundred years there has been a lot of studies in to children. I recall watching something years back about the pre-Victorian attitudes to children. When the world was a very religious place, all children were sinners and it was the adults job to make them good. Corruptive adults used this- it was a way of silencing the victim and making them think that they were doing something God, etc wanted. We now live in a very secular society, where we know that this is not true. However, in some parts of the world, religion is still used to manipulate children to the adults will.
With the arrival of science & research, we now don't live by the delusions that children are sinners; they are small, developing humans. And with the arrival of research has come the arrival of being able to study & observe children who have behavioural problems due to abuse, in contrast to those who haven't been abused.
Look up David Finklehor on Google Scholar. He leads a lot of research in to sexual abuse and has done for many years. One of his papers indentifies the factors of abuse that leads to long term psychological distress.
You pose an interesting question, yet to go back as far as a couple of thousand years is unrealistic. You only really have to go back about 100 years if you want to look at how attitudes to sexual abuse have changed. Yet these changes have been made because we now understand it better & we understand the victims better. It's not about enlightenment- it's about moral development.
Where it was once acceptable for an 8 year old to be working in a brothel; we now, rightfully, see that as destructive and disgusting. Yet back then, it was also acceptable to throw your over-flowing sewage pot in to the gutter and women weren't allowed to vote.
I think we can all agree- times have changed for the better!
An interesting post.
Best wishes.
V
Violet-Ivy, I certainly enjoyed reading and re-reading your post. You sure had enough in your family and your own early years to be able to write a book.
I didn't mean to imply that I thought the caveman was much like us I just had to pick a time span to make my point. If you look up a chart of average life spans by year it is very misleading. You only have to go back about a hundred years to find a number that makes it look like people lived just long enough to procreate. Averages can be very misleading because 300 years ago infant mortality was very high. If half the people died before they reached 3 or 4 years of age that certainly lowers the average while anyone who made it to adulthood probably lived long enough to see grand children.
It certainly is true that our bodies were designed for a time when a mother was probably lucky to live long enough to see her child have a child. We seem to lose sight of that fact when there are so many who ask why early teenagers are so turned on. We had to be to keep the species going. It's not a bad thing but it is problematic in modern society.
I recently found my roots back to the first one who came to the US around 1620-1635. He is not found in any ships records so they believe he must have been a minor when he arrived but he is shown to be a part of a town as an adult in 1638. Looking at those records, many of my ancestors lived to a ripe old age while some of them not quite. I was not lucky enough to have known either of my grand fathers and I did inherit my father's family heart disease. My mother was 102 when she died a few years ago so I'm hoping I have some of her genes too. With the modern miracle of heart bypass surgery, the rest of my body may make it as long we can keep the plumbing working.
I have no doubt that much of the abuse described here is horrific and debilitating but I also wonder if as adults we make it even worse in the mind of the child by our reactions to it.
I certainly do not feel abused for any of the things I experienced but I'm sure my mother would have had a very unpleasant (for me) reaction if she had known about some of the things we did. I don't know if you have seen my account around the board but I'll give you a brief synopsis. I had only girls for playmates until I was old enough to begin exploring outside my neighborhood. One was 6 months younger and the other a year younger.
One day when I was about 6 one of them had been enlightened by her older brother that boys had a bat and two balls while girls had two bisquits. We were discussing that when they wanted to check that out. I was out voted but I did manage to negotiate some equality. The one with brothers said mine didn't look at all like her brother's. My mother had already made me aware of what was done to some boys at birth so I knew what she meant and I pulled my foreskin back to show her it WAS like his. What happened next was in no way disconcerting to me but we all knew we couldn't tell our parents what we were doing.
She was intrigued by that turtle neck piece of skin and she wanted to push it back herself. I didn't mind as my mother had always done that at bath time so having her do it was no big thing. To the amazement of all three of us, when she pushed it back the whole tiny thing stood up like a soldier at attention. After that they wanted to see it do that whenever they happened to think of it and I liked it when they touched it so I let them. They even showed it to their girl cousins and visitors. As I mentioned I got to check out the bisquits but I didn't find much of anything very interesting there. How things change as you get older. As time went on we lost interest and stopped doing that.
I'm sure that's not at all comparable to being forced and I never felt abused or guilty. As I see it, we were basically the same age and we were exploring our differences. My mother had two brothers and she was a real tomboy. She used to tell me about sliding down hill toward a stream on the wet grass. Of course they were scared to get their clothes dirty so they took them off. One time she got the worst case of Poison Ivy, where you never want to get that.
We used to play in the lawn sprinkler on hot days. No one owned a bathing suit when we were little. That was a waste of money our parents couldn't afford so we just wore our underpants. You know what happens to cotton when it gets wet. It gets heavy and falls down around your ankles. Now that we were familiar with the bisquits and bat and balls we just chucked them aside instead of trying to keep them pulled up. Once in a while a parent would come out and make us put them back on, which lasted about as long as it took for the parent to get out of sight. I wonder if they really ran right out every time they looked out the window and saw us playing naked. Of course the girls were not old enough to be hiding behind tops and I remember one time when we were wondering about where the milk came out of their nipples to feed a baby. I could not find any holes in their nipples and they were rather disappointed. They checked mine to see if we could find a difference. We never did.
If my childhood was truly unusual because of the experiences I/we had, I can only say "thank you Lord". I didn't spend my early teen years trying to get my hands in the pants of any girl who got close enough, because I wanted to find out what was in there. But it was quite a shock when I was 16 and went swimming with a girl who had hair sticking out both sides of her bathing suit. I was sure surprised that girls had hair down there.
Thanks for writing
njoy
I am 33 and I knew at the age of 13 that it wasn't my fault and that I had done nothing wrong. It's just that I have no life at all. I have no friends haven't since the end of 1988. I just can't keep on going on this way.
Talk soon I hope
And if its ok with you, i'll be your friend, keep in touch :)
My name is Shelley and I cannot work because of a bad back injury that I've had and it's getting worse unfortunately. I also had a very serious head injury 3 weeks b4 being sexually abused and my abuser killed himself once he was confronted by my father another girls father and an inderpendent person 2 . 5 weeks later he was dead and the full truth didn't come out until his father demanded a cororner inquest. Which is to why to establish he killed himself. Then my mother wouldn't let me give a statement to the police mum thought it would be too stressful for me.
So I have never had any justice at all.
And I must have a neon sign on my head because I have been raped at least 6 times since the age of 15 and have been sexually assaulted another 20+ times on top of that after the age of 17. So I just stay to myself.
Take Care
Shelley
ps if u have MSN let me know and I will let you know my MSN email addy and please put in a message or let me know what ur email addy is otherwise I will report u as spam as I get soooooo many ppl asking me to add them and they are just wanting to show u X rated sex scenes and wanting u to pay for it too.