Health/Psychology: Phantoms from the Dark: Early Childhood Sexual Abuse

As a child, I developed a love for gothic novels. Usually set in New England or old England, these stories would invariably involve a young woman who gets trapped, often by marriage, in a grand old Victorian house with a family hiding a dark secret. The secret was the plot’s MacGuffin, the thing which the heroine must possess in order to free herself from the past. With chilling accuracy, this resembles the situation for many victims of childhood sexual abuse. Since many don’t remember their abuse, they are very much like the typical gothic heroine and the key to their survival is in unlocking the secret that their families have been keeping from them.

I know, because I’m a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. Five years ago, I wouldn’t have thought it possible. I knew that I’d been abused, that my mother’s treatment of her children, with beatings and unprovoked violent tantrums, would today be considered criminal behavior. But never did the thought cross my mind that I’d been sexually victimized.

Then, several years ago, my therapist urged me to consider the possibility that I’’d been sexually abused at a very young age. He said that he’d suspected this for some time, and the imagery in a dream I was telling him seemed to prove it as far as he was concerned. Furthermore, he was convinced that the abuser had been my father, who’d died three years earlier.

I’d known some victims, so I knew a little about the subject. I knew enough to know that while suppressed memories of sexual abuse are fairly common (and somewhat controversial), they’re usually accompanied by a loss of other memories as well, leaving most victims with “suppressed memory syndrome” with few, if any, memories before the age of seven or eight. Those I’ve known with suppressed memories say their lives are just a dark blur before that age.

Since I can easily remember back to the age of three, and even remember snatches of learning to walk, I always figured that if I had been sexually abused I would’ve remembered it. But, as my therapist explained his theory, I grew heavy and sank deeper in my seat. Somehow, I knew he had to be right, that somebody had messed with me when I was very young. I knew, because a voice whispered to me from my unconscious in much the same way that school children whisper secrets. The voice told me that he was speaking the truth.

Before I left his office, the therapist let me load-up on books on early childhood sexual abuse from his library. On the drive home, my mind churned over the implications of this discovery - if it was true. As the oldest child, I’d always felt a special closeness with my father and I wasn’t willing to sever that bond merely because of a whisper from my unconscious, especially since I couldn’t remember being abused.

The suspicion that I was abused continued to nag at me, however, and a few days later I called my sister Elizabeth, who lived with her husband and two year old son in Florida. “Elizabeth, I think I was sexually abused when I was little. Real little. Like a baby,” I blurted almost as soon as she answered the phone.

“Do you know who did it?” she asked.

“No.” I didn’t want to tell her that my therapist suspected our father. Even though she’d never been particularly close to him, I wasn’t sure how she’d react to that bit of news.

“When you find out who it is, I want to know,” she said flatly, “because I want to know who did it to me.”

This was too much. Way too much.

Elizabeth also didn’t remember being abused. Like me, she’d seen a therapist who said she manifested all the classic symptoms of an abuse victim. Again like me, a voice whispered from her unconscious, telling her this was true. She said that our sister Jean, who lived out on the west coast, had also seen a shrink who’d told her that she was likely a victim as well. Our doctors independently reached the conclusion that, for all of us, the abuse happened before we were four years old. All three doctors pegged our father as the abuser.

In Elizabeth’s case, if Dad was the perpetrator it had to happen when she was young, since he injured himself in a horse accident when she was three and a half and suffered a brain injury that left him a quadriplegic. He retained partial use of one arm and hand, but was bedridden for the last sixteen years of his life, not able to feed or cleanse himself. If he was an abuser, it wasn’t very likely that he did too much molesting after that, since about all he was capable of was typing on his computer.

I spent the next days and weeks pouring through the books I’d borrowed from my therapist. Many of the volumes were full of case histories, attempting to illustrate the profile of abuse victims and their families in order to help mental health workers to understand and diagnose cases. There were many similarities, both in the victims’ families and in the psychological make-up of the victims themselves.

Almost always, if one child in a family is sexually abused by a parent, then all or most of the children in that family are also abused. The abusive parent is usually the father, with the most usual cases involving fathers and daughters, although instances of father and son are not uncommon. Mothers, too, abuse their children, usually mother and son, though not nearly as often.

The sexual abuse of children is a learned behavior: Child abuse begets child abuse. When a child acts-out sexually against a sibling, such as a brother molesting his sister, that nearly always means that the abusing child was himself or herself molested. Likewise, a father who abuses his daughter or son was probably also an abused child, though that in no way exonerates him for his crime. Most abused children do not grow up to be abusers.

Childhood sexual abuse is an epidemic. By some estimates, nearly one-half of all American girls are abused by a family member or friend of the family before reaching age sixteen. Some psychologists think the number to be even higher. In some areas of the country, like parts of the rural south where I live, fathers raping daughters is almost considered a paternal right. For instance, the father of one of my therapist’s clients was indignant when confronted, telling the therapist, “It’s a fine thing when a father can’t raise his own fucking.”

Although this isn’t exclusively a feminist issue, since the sexual abuse of children touches all facets of society and effects both genders, it is an issue that should be of special concern to women. Not only are we most often the victims of abuse but, as mothers, we are most often the ones in the position to stop it.

Unfortunately, too often mothers do not protect their children from their abusers. One woman I know was molested by an older cousin from the time she was about four until she was ten or eleven. The abuse happened in a basement rec-room in a house that her family visited often. My friend told her parents what her cousin was doing, but they didn’t believe her and continued to insist that she go down in the basement and “play” with her cousin, so they could have drinking parties upstairs in the kitchen.

When the abuser is the child’s father, support from the mother can be even less forthcoming. In these cases, the mother will often blame the child and initiate a bizarre competition for the attention of the offending male. As it turns out, this was the case in my own family dynamics, where the beatings inflicted on us children by our mother was the result of her blaming us for his actions. Of course, this only perpetuates the self-blame to which molested children are prone.

Like many such mothers, mine was in complete denial that the abuse ever happened or that she had helped it along by becoming an abusive parent herself. For years, when confronted by her now grown children about her own abusive behavior, she blamed her conduct on the pep-pills our family doctor prescribed as an antidote to listlessness and depression. When I first told her of my suspicions of my sexual abuse, the first words out of her mouth were, “I know it wasn’t your father,” even though I’d not yet mentioned that I suspected him.

In the gothic novels that I read in my youth, the heroine starts with a suspicion, usually about her new husband and some horrendous crime that she suspects he’s committed. With the help of a family member or friend, most often another women, she uncovers the truth and her husband is cleared of any wrongdoing, allowing the newlyweds to live happily ever after, unencumbered by the past.

In my case, it was my mother who eventually supplied the key I needed to understand my abuse and to finally place blame on my abuser without guilt. On a day off from work I’d driven up to her home, arriving about noon. She’d been expecting me and had lunch waiting. As we sat down at the kitchen table, she said, “I need to talk to you about your father.”

She told me that soon after Father had died, she took his computer to an expert she knew to make sure there was no personal information stored on it before she gave it to one of her children. Upon examining the computer’s hard drive, her friend discovered that my father had been busy writing short stories when he died. The stories were graphically pornographic and involved very young girls.

“They were nasty,” she said, scrunching her nose as if trying to block a strong odor.

There was more. She’d begun remembering times, years ago when we children were little, when she’d suspected abuse but didn’t want to believe it and had banished her suspicions to oblivion. It seems that mothers can suppress memories of abuse nearly as easily as child victims can. Then she told me stories about him beating her, which I didn’t know about before.

Finally, the secret was told and I could get on with the process of dealing with my abuse. I could now freely blame my abuser, my father, without guilt. In the years since, I’ve learned that adults who were sexually molested as children can heal from the traumas inflicted on them, but the process is long and difficult. In my case, the healing began when I accepted my victim-hood, when I began to see that my personality disorders and inner conflicts were the result of something that had been done to me, by a betrayal of trust from a loved one.

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