Attempted rapes and actual rapes where I felt my life threatened were responded with all the bells and whistles at first; An article in the paper, life-long therapy, police involvement…. – but then dropped by the entire system (as many survivours experience) because of doubt, disbelief and an apathetic police force that performed improper investigations. The opposite of the hysteria claimed by this article – apathy really. This experience of apathy re-victimized me. The silence is deafening. My rape kit and DNA – lost. Investigations shelved. Etc….

Whereas, other abuses that were sexual in nature but not life threatening- a family friend waking me for sex, a relative attempting sex, a friend’s father speaking inappropriately to me etc… these “softer” abuses made me uncomfortable – and yes, less mistrustful of men generally – but In NO way was I traumatized in the way I was when my life felt threatened during the rapes. And, these I keep silent about in order to avoid the overreaction that they could cause.

So, while I feel frustrated, betrayed, and let down by a system that failed to offer protection and or justice from violent rapes…. I also feel that the very same system would overreact to these lesser events by lumping them all into a category of ‘traumatic abuse’.

This is why I feel it so important to have forums from victims’ perspectives instead of the current model where our experiences are silenced.

Hysterical moralistic vigilantism from middle-class mediocrities, gutless opportunism from the political and legal class, and professional empire building by the psycho-babblers. A truly lethal cocktail.

Wow. An absolutely brilliant statement that jarringly but oh-so-clearly put things into perspective for me. Thanks for writing that.

First, I have concerns, in general, with the hijicking of the term “Abuse” to mean only Sexual Abuse. I realize that the authors of these articles often don’t write the Headlines/Taglines – that’s often done by misguided editors. For the record, this article itself was quite clear that it was referring to sexual abuse specifically. My concerns are with the title (“Societal Assumptions on Abuse”) and all others like them which are in fact referring to SA only, that have the overall effect of making non-sexual child abuse (which is ironically far more likely to produce actual severe trauma and death) essentially “disappear” from the public discourse and conciousness.

Further, there is, as this article and many of its commenters have pointed out, somewhat of an “industry” unquestioningly pairing “Abuse” (by which they often mean ONLY SA) with “trauma”.

Lastly, and where the above becomes problematic, this sometimes misguided use of the term “trauma” is used to encompass both “violation” (which many of the above descriptions of SA are) and the type of trauma which produces PTSD (which by definition means life-threatening to the point that the victim expected that s/he would not physically survive).

So what we end up with, because we don’t really look closely at the terms we’re using, is an assumption that abuse=SA, and all SA=Trauma and Trauma=PTSD, therefore all SA requires the ‘full court press’ that is, in truth, probably warranted for those victims whose experience WAS threatening enough to produce PTSD.

There are more implications to the situation described in your article. As a survivor of sadistic NON-sexual but severe physical and psychological abuse, where I was often threatened with death by my mother(a medical professional who knew how not to leave evidence), my non-sexual life-threatening trauma is invariably considered to be far less damaging because I didn’t experience SA, and there are absolutely no supports and resources for adult survivors that aren’t loaded with the assumptions that my abuse isn’t as relevant, important, or damaging. So the ‘full-court press’ of services, which I probably could have used and which would have validated and countered my experience of being a “disposable-at-whim, not-deserving-of-life, here-only-to-experience-pain-for-someone-else’s-pleasure human being” is unavailable to me and the unfortunate children who come after me, while simultaneously being (from the comments above) inappropriately ‘forced’ on those for whom it is more damaging than their original experience.

But the problem is, the social perception of somebody who has been sexually abused is that they are going to be totally anti-social with the whole ‘relationship’ aspect of their life. I think that what society needs to be told and made to understand is that often these things (whilst needing to be dealt with for a short time) need to be left alone after a while because the ongoing reptition of the events in somebody’s head can lead to an even worse recreation of the vent, due to the wonderful, or in this case horrible, system of cretivity that the mind holds. Normally a while after the event has happened, some aspects of it are left behind in the even expanding line of time, and so are forgotten, thus leaving gaps in the event of the memory. Normally when the event is ignored there is no need for the memory blanks to be filled in, and it is when councelling comes in that the need by others for the whole event to come out forces the mind to think up what might have happened, often making it seem worse that it actually was in relation to how they feel about the abuse now.

Also, just to add to what has been said before, i feel that a lot of the children that feel that they were in the wrong for being abused feel that way because often (in 50/50 of the cases) they are too young to really understand in the entirety what has happened. And since, as was stated before, that they often know and trust the person, and therefore look up to them, then the child may think that the adult knows more about what was going on than they do and can be left to feel as though they know nothing and so must trust the adult and agree with them.

Sorry for the long post, just had a few things that i needed to say, for everyone to think about

I bitterly regret ever mentioning it to anybody. (This is the first time I have since then.)

Hysterical moralistic vigilantism from middle-class mediocrities, gutless opportunism from the political and legal class, and professional empire building by the psycho-babblers. A truly lethal cocktail.

I wish we had a Mental Health Revolution like Jamie Oliver’s doing for healthy eating, ordinary people are so I’ll-prepared and under-equipped to handle these subjects and end up being insensitive and judgmental when what theyneed to be is compassionate and accepting.

Speaking from experience… When folks find out what kind of childhood I had to endure, they actually want to deny me that reality because I’m otherwise so “put together” in their eyes, they can’t believe I would fit inside their personal definition of “damaged goods” (a permanent condition) which is, by and large, the prevailing stereotype in our culture.

I felt quite strongly that, in cases without severe trauma or coercion, the child was in fact very badly served by the system set up to protect them.

I mean if, on whatever level, the child had “consented” to a relationship with an adult – often a trusted one – then the child itself was somehow guilty: for if he wasn’t, why were all these awful things happening to him?

(I became rather loathe to voice this. At one child protection course where I brought this up the instructor said: “that’s what paedophiles claim.” That shut me up.)

But I don’t know the answer to this. We can’t downplay CSA, we can’t ignore it, and we must prevent it legally in every way we can: it does, however, seem unpleasantly ironic that our response to a victim’s disclosure seems exquisitely designed to prolong the victim’s suffering and to create in his or her mind the most fertile grounds for subsequent, lifelong trauma.

I was also watching am interview documentary about two 11-year-old British girls who had been aducted, raped, and imprisoned for several days by a paedophile – pretty much the nightmare scenario, except that they were found, and saved. One of the girls (who are now OK and grown up) recalled her unhappiness for years afterwards with the breakdown of her relationship with her friend. This had to do with their counselling: after about a year the friend refused to go, while the other girl had to continue, and she found the constant reference, over and over again, to the events themselves destructive and distasteful – in a sense, the well-meaning counsellor was merely repeating and perpetuating the abuse itself.

Sorry for the long post. I can’t see an obvious answer – perhaps it begins with an acknowledgement that there is a problem here and that society’s often hysterial response to paedophilia can sometimes harm the victims themselves.