Stop Trivializing Child Sexual Abuse
February 1, 2010 by Diane
As promised, this is my response to my last blog Harvard – “Child Sexual Abuse Not Traumatic”. I am disgusted and full of rage.
Neither Clancy nor the reporter are trained in trauma, but this is Clancy’s way of getting notoriety at the expense of child abuse survivors. She states that, “If instances of sexual abuse are simply among the many confusions that characterize childhood, they are perfectly forgettable.”
When a young relative of mine who at 4-years-old was forced to perform oral sex on her father, she wasn’t confused, she was traumatized. When I woke up during the middle of the night when I was 12-years-old to find my father’s head between my legs, I wasn’t confused, I was traumatized.
I am also sick of hearing the tired old message that “there is no such thing as repressed memories.” You show me one of these so-called experts on memory who has sat with a survivor day after day, month after month, year after year, working toward healing and recovery from child sexual abuse, and who in the process the survivor recalls one of the horrendous sexual assaults she had buried in her mind, and then tell me “there is no such thing as repressed memories.” I’ll go out in public and quack like a duck. That’s how ridiculous all this so-called controversy is. There is no controversy. It is a tactic by those who support pedophiles to silence survivors and the therapists who treat them.
Until family members have the guts to:
- Stand up to the perpetrators in their own families,
- Do whatever they have to do to stop the child from being abused,
- Report them to the police if necessary as the criminals that they are, and
- Show compassion and a sense of integrity by caring for both the abused children and adult survivors in their families,
nothing will change.
Is it hard to do that? You bet it is, but it is a million times harder for a child to experience abuse and to then spend a lifetime coping with the consequences. I did in my family because I was not going to stand by and let it continue.
This is what I would have written to the New York Times, but I know they wouldn’t publish it.
Let’s face it, if Law and Order can get it right, perhaps Clancy needs to talk to their writers.
Someday, we, as survivors, will have our day. We will get the compassion and justice we deserve. One of those ways is to own our feelings and reject the hypocrisy that is fed to the public every day – all in the name of rejecting the truth about what happens all over America. I hope you will join me in this fight.
This entry was posted on Monday, February 1, 2010 at 8:14 am and is filed under Brick Wall of Denial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 1, 2010 at 12:39 pm
I agree with everything you said, particuarly when you call Clancy’s book “a tactic by those who support pedophiles to silence survivors and the therapists who treat them.”
I bet every abused child has had to face this tactic ever since the very beginning. If the family cared, there would be no such thing as child abuse, but because they don’t, they have no problem in calling the child who speaks out crazy, liar or – with Clancy’s cute idea to fish out old patterns – making a fuss out of nothing. Some wrong-doing psychiatrists and psychologists even made up the fake memories theory just for that.
When people ask me why didn’t I speak out as a child, my answer is because no one would listen. In my family, every now and again someone would say: “Remember you can always count on me if you have a problem. I will always be here for you”. Except that each and every time I tried to get help about matters I coudn’t handle on my own, I got yelled at or hit or punished or humiliated to the core. Which taught me very early to keep my mouth shut, or my problems would be redoubled meanly. In any case, I never got to the point of telling the plain truth because I was simply silenced before I could get there. But because I was traumatized, I was all the same sent to a number of psychologists – I was 7 years old the first time -, whose brilliant diagnosis was “The child is too attched to her mother”. And my abuser was safe to keep doing what he wanted. I told a priest at the age of 11. He looked so young and caring, and all that talking about faith and trust made me lose my grip for a time and send him a letter. I still don’t know if he ever did anything about that, I never saw him again.
When my abuser died, I tried once again to say what he did to me. I was 15 years old at the time. “I did not cry this morning when I was given the news” I began, getting ready to explain why to the nth therapist of my life. But I never got there, because I was accused of being unaffectionate.
The point is that as a child I knew all too well what kind of response I would get if I ever talked about my abuse. So I didn’t push to get the outcome I was looking for. But when I finally did, a couple of years ago (I will soon be 40), I got exactly the same reactions I knew I would get as a child. Had I been born 40 years earlier, my family would have shut me up in an asylum. They can’t do that now, but they still cut me out of any possible realtionship with family, friends and aquaintances. They were made to believe I am crazy and out of control.
In a way, it is refreshing to finally see everything clear. For the first time in my life, I am refusing to tell THEIR made up story about my life.
The point is, I think, Clancy’s fairy tale about abused children cannot hurt me anymore. But it can do loads of damage to the children that are now suffering abuse. Their actual possibility of finding help to get out of their horrible situation is getting thinner under the attack of huge Harvard. And this is sad and unspeakably mean.
February 1, 2010 at 2:36 pm
Very well said! I will make just one correction. The phony, made-up expression false memory which is usually talked about when discussing repressed memories was indeed a fabricated term. The parents of a woman working on her doctorate coined the phrase. Neither parent, however, was trained in psychology, or in child abuse, or in trauma for that matter. Since then, other psychiatrists and psychologists have joined the bandwagon. Some make a LOT of money joining the defense teams of accused pedophiles and preaching their mantra about false/repressed memories. So draw your own conclusions.
March 7, 2010 at 2:17 pm
This is a great post. Associations such as the AMA and APA report that there is a consensus among clinicians and researchers that repressed memories do exist. The whole “false memory syndrome” concept, like you said, was made up by two parents (Peter and Pamela Freyd) whose daughter recovered memories of abuse in therapy. The parents then went on to form the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. It is interesting to note that the brother of Peter Freyd wrote a letter in which he stated that he believed that there was abuse going on in the Freyd home when their children were growing up. The truth is, memory is a complicated subject, and how a study is done is just as crucial as what its reported results are.
March 7, 2010 at 2:34 pm
I couldn’t have said it better myself. We, as survivors, and everyone else who wants the truth to be known, needs to continue to stand up to and reject the nonsense put out by self-serving people. I always say, “For what purpose does it serve to demean the reality of child abuse and the resulting diagnoses we are saddled with?” I didn’t spend 23 years of my life in therapy working on my trauma, including my repressed memories, to watch some person at a university make money denouncing what I went through.