Read an Excerpt
One
Was It Sexual Abuse?I just didn't think that adults had sex with children.--Darlene, who as a preteen was raped
repeatedly by a brother-in-law
If you are reading this book, you might have found at some point in your life that you were on your own, searching for the words to name what was happening to you. Or for the courage to get away, or the power to make it stop. You may have figured that it happened to everybody, because it had become so routine in your life. You might have even expected it, felt your body respond to it. You might have carried the secret for years, or maybe you're still carrying it today.
Without enlightenment, we struggle, we are on our own, in the dark, trying to understand why we're "evil, all the time," as one sister said to me. Or why our families may get together and laugh easily but rarely come to terms with deep, deep troubles. For many of us, we have buried sexual abuse so deep into our psyches that we would never connect it to today's physical illnesses and pain, our depression or addiction, our inability to hold a job, get out of debt, find satisfaction in a relationship, nurture our children, or simply say no to people or situations that do us harm.
But knowledge, as does faith, helps to light the way. Knowledge clears the fog of ignorance so that we can see what's real and true, even if it's ugly. It helps us see how our families enable and even encourage abuse. And it helps us learn how to hold abusers accountable, or at the least not be intimidated by them. Knowledge helps us understand how abuse has affected our lives and what we can do tountangle those effects from the life we want to live. And it helps us see our experience within the context of our culture and the larger society.
All About PowerSexual abuse, simply put, is when a person in power or authority uses you or forces you to perform for his or her sexual gratification. Sexual abuse can range from noncontact flashing and use of explicit pictures and language to touching and kissing to digital and penile penetration. It is a crime, which often stems from a sickness.(1) And it is a violation of your body, your mind, and your spirit. It is perhaps the nature of the crime that leads us to believe that what happens behind closed doors should stay there, but it is often in the shadow of silence that problems like depression and addiction develop, enabling abuse to continue for generations.
The power of an abuser can be physical or assumed. Clergy members and teachers have power in their positions as spiritual and educational leaders. A friend of the family has power because he is an adult and because he has connections to the parents that a child does not have. The power of a boss or coach stems from that role of authority. A babysitter's power and authority are inherent in her position as a caregiver and substitute for parents. A cousin may not be bigger in size but may seem to have more household clout because of the way he commands his elders' attention and respect. The term incest can mean sexual relations between family members, regardless of age. Throughout my book I will use the terms
child sexual abuse and
sexual abuse, which more specifically describes adults' illegal sexual contact with children.
I will focus on the sexual abuse of children and abuse committed by family, informal family, and friends because we are more likely to be abused as children than as adults, and, contrary to the "stranger danger" warnings that many of us remember from childhood, we are most likely to be abused by someone we know.(2) It is in these instances--in a tangle of confusion, fear, embarrassment, and shame--that the silence is most pervasive. Most abuse is committed by adult males against younger females, though women are known to abuse, children are known to abuse, and boys and young men are also abused.(3) I will refer most often to instances in which women were abused in childhood by adult males, but I have included a chapter (Chapter 6) on the specific challenges of boys who are abused.
If you have ever been sexually abused, then you should consider yourself a survivor in recognition of your fortitude, no matter the negative impact, no matter what harmful ways you have found to cope with your experience. Anyone who has been sexually violated and has lived to tell about it, including myself, I will refer to as a survivor. I give a nod to the noted feminist scholar Traci C. West, who uses the term
victim-survivor to remind readers "of the dual status of women who have been victimized by assault and survived it." She notes: "Black women are sometimes denied an opportunity to have their victimization recognized."(4)
A survivor once wrote to me: "Is it abuse if you don't have sex?" The answer is: Absolutely. We might dismiss or minimize our experience of abuse because it was "only touching" or "it happened only once" or "it was a long time ago." But abuse has many forms and faces, and each can be devastating in its own way. You can determine if what you experienced was abuse by asking yourself these questions:
What Happened?• Was I touched or kissed in a way that made me feel uncomfortable?
• Were words with sexual overtones used to describe my body?
• Were words about sexual acts used in my presence?
• Was I made to view sexual acts?
• Was I made to pose for sexual photos or movies?
• Was I forced to touch someone else's genitals or breasts?
• Was I made to put my mouth on someone else's genitals or breasts?
• Was I raped or penetrated?
• Was the person who did this in a more powerful role than me (bigger, stronger, older, in authority)?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you were most likely sexually abused. The "Help Yourself" exercise at the end of this chapter focuses on the symptoms that can help you acknowledge past abuse. Together these questions and the exercise can help you be clear and sure. It doesn't matter how long ago, or how often, though more severe abuse has been linked to more severe health-related problems.(5) One episode is enough to cause a lifetime of damage. There need not be a threat or physical violence, merely a touch, innuendo, or some other sexual act that makes you uncomfortable. And without some form of therapeutic help, it is difficult to simply "get over it," as many survivors are told to do, or have tried to do. Shirley, who is in her seventies, still vaguely remembers being abused by her mother's husband, a man whom she refuses to call "father." She was about three at the time it started. Whenever she speaks out about it, she finds that through her testimony, she heals a bit more: "My daily life is not fraught with fear. But the triggers, they take me back to where I was. Triggers like what's happening with the Catholic Church and all those priests, or somebody might touch me when I'm not expecting it. I've not done all my work in healing. I've done it in segments over the years. And I've learned to tell my story. I've just tried to get functional. That's good enough for me."
How Big Is Yhis Problem?Because of fear, shame, and cultural baggage, most of us keep this violation to ourselves, making sexual abuse one of the least-reported crimes in the United States.(6) Statistics vary widely, depending on the type of research and the size of the study's sample, and even what behaviors are considered abusive. About 87,000 children were sexually abused in 2001, according to the Department of Health and Human Services' National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, which tracks confirmed cases of abuse. But chronic underreporting means that no statistics truly reflect the extent of abuse in our country. These widely quoted numbers from surveys of adults looking back on their childhoods reflect how prevalent the problem is: About one in four women and one in six men report that they were sexually abused as children.(7)
Using these estimates, among African Americans, that translates to about 3.3 million women and 1.9 million men eighteen and older who have reported a history of sexual abuse.(8) If it were considered a disease, experts would have labeled sexual abuse an epidemic long ago.
Comprehensive research on sexual abuse is relatively new; major studies on the issue have been produced only in the last twenty or so years. And not surprisingly, research that focuses on Black Americans' experience is rare; few studies examine the role of race and culture in survivors' experiences. One noted exception is the work of Gail E. Wyatt, a clinical psychologist and professor at UCLA. I will refer regularly to Wyatt's pioneering in-depth studies exploring the impact of abuse on the lives of Black women. "We're certainly not the only group that's silent regarding abuse," says Wyatt, who has written several books on abuse and sexuality. "But we're the only group whose experience is compounded by our history of slavery and stereotypes about Black sexuality, and that makes discussion more difficult."
Fast Facts• Blacks are sexually victimized in childhood at the same rate as Whites. In one survey, they reported being more severely abused with greater force.(9)
• Family members and acquaintances account for 93 percent of sexual assaults against people under age eighteen.(10)
• In estimates of cases known to child protective agencies or community workers, girls were sexually abused three times more often than boys.(11)
• Sexual abuse before age eighteen increases a woman's risk of becoming HIV-positive more than any other factor in her life.(12)
Abuse is debilitating. Its impact on behavior is lifelong and potentially deadly. For children, abuse can stunt their psychological and emotional development. E. Sue Blume writes that abused children experience "a course of development (emotional, interpersonal, sexual) that is shared, every day, with premature sexuality, lack of safety (even terror) and deformities of many life skills. The child victim's entire view of herself and the world will be clouded by the effects of her abuse."(13)
Most research into sexual abuse focuses on the psychological effects: Survivors are more likely to experience depression than women who weren't abused, studies show; the longer the abuse lasts and the more violent, the more severe the problems.(14) However, no study can truly reflect the range of experiences and their related effects. One woman who was propositioned but never touched by her mother's boyfriend spoke of an enormous sense of shame that she was somehow enticing him. We will explore the impact of abuse, and the silence that often follows, in the next two chapters.
Many psychological problems can lead to or complicate physical problems, such as reproductive disorders. Abuse also affects women's sexual choices: Survivors are more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior that leads to disease and pregnancy. In one study, 66 percent of pregnant teens reported a history of abuse.(15) Sixty-six percent of all prostitutes were sexually abused as children, and 66 percent of sexually abused prostitutes were abused by fathers, stepfathers, or foster fathers.(16) Another recent study showed that sexual abuse before age eighteen increased a woman's risk of becoming HIV-positive more than any other factor in her life.(17)
Ultimately, as a society, we all pay for sexual abuse through public and private money spent on crisis intervention, child protection services, medical treatment, foster care, and the criminal justice system. Other directly related costs include those for mental health care and counseling, substance abuse treatment, and social services programs for indigent clients and the mentally ill. Among secondary costs, consider simply the cumulative lost time from work that can be linked to survivors' history of sexual violation. Studies have shown that it is far cheaper to provide prevention services than to pay for intervention and treatment.
All acts of sexual abuse should be reported immediately to your local police, rape crisis center, or social service agency, and the survivor should get immediate physical and mental help. By law, adults whose work puts them in contact with children are supposed to report signs that a child has been abused (see Chapter 5, "Protecting and Saving Our Children") to the authorities. In some states, every person with a reasonable suspicion must report or face fines or even jail time. Adult survivors who want to take legal action against their abusers may do so by pressing criminal charges or filing a civil lawsuit. Whatever the judicial outcome of the abuser's case, that person must receive professional treatment as well. We will explore treatment for survivors and reporting abusers in Chapters 4 and 7.
Why Is This
Our Problem?
Sexual abuse spans all racial, gender, economic, and social boundaries. At least one study shows that abuse is more common among children in lower-income families.(18) Because African Americans are disproportionately poor, it may seem that Blacks are at a disproportionate risk for being abused. But it should be noted that abuse is more likely
to be reported among low-income families because they tend to be in contact with public agencies and authorities more than others, and may be observed more. Also, those who tend to report suspicions of abuse, such as teachers and doctors, may be more likely to suspect abuse in lower-income families. That means that the problem goes virtually undetected in those families whose race or ethnicity, money, status, or social standing insulates them from people who might otherwise turn a trained eye to warning signs.
Abuse is our problem because while studies show that Black children are victimized just as often as White children, survivors report different reactions to their experiences. And we must remember that in addition to the trauma of sexual violation, survivors must also deal with the trauma of being born and raised in a racist and sexist culture.(19) Wyatt's study comparing experiences of rape includes some significant differences:20
• Black American women were more likely to have withheld reports of attempted rape from authorities.
• Black Americans were significantly more likely than Whites to blame their living circumstances for placing them at risk for victimization.
• Black Americans tended to be the victims of repeated assaults slightly more often than Whites.
• Black Americans were significantly more likely than Whites to have heard sexual and racial stereotypes regarding which kinds of women are likely to be raped.
In another study, Blacks reported that they were more likely than Whites to be abused severely in terms of the sex acts involved, and the abuse was more likely to be accompanied by force. They were less likely to be abused by a father and more often abused by their uncles.(21) I will show in detail in this and the following chapters some specific ways that Black women were affected.
Read a Sample Chapter
No Secrets No Lies
How Black Families Can Heal from Sexual Abuse
By Robin Stone Broadway
Copyright © 2004 Robin D. Stone
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-7679-1344-2
Introduction
If only this book weren't needed. But chances are that if you are reading it, you are seeking to help yourself or someone you love to heal from childhood sexual abuse. Know that you are not alone: an estimated one in four women and one in six men report that they were sexually abused as children.
I am among those survivors. For years I was also among the many who live in the shadows of silence and shame. Sexual abuse is a tough subject for most anyone to discuss, but it is especially difficult for those who have experienced it to expose long-buried wounds. For me, doing so took years of healing work, and in the end, it helped me see and understand not only the devastation of sexual violation, but also the damage of the silence, secrets, and denial that often follow.
Today, I am healthy and happy and whole. I have a husband and son whom I love dearly, family and friends whom I cherish, a spiritual center that keeps me grounded and helps me soar, a satisfying professional life, and meaningful connections with my community. But it wasn't easy to get there. Here's how I found my way.
I had been deputy editor of Essence magazine for about a year when, in 1998, our senior editorial team went on a retreat in upstate New York. The editor in chief at the time, Susan Taylor, had invited a motivational expert along to help us brainstorm for new article ideas.
Here we were, at the nation's leading magazine for Black women, gathered to find new ways to empower our readers. The expert started by asking each of us to draw two pictures-one as we saw ourselves, and the other as we'd like to see ourselves. When it was my turn, I held up my intricate handiwork: a harried-looking stick figure with disheveled hair struggling to balance two baskets of eggs, with some eggs spilling and others a cracked mess on the floor.
It was a reflection of my life as a wife and new mother, with a fairly new job and responsibilities as a new executive board member of a national nonprofit organization-or so I thought. As I showed my second drawing, a serene, smiling sister, hair in place, calmly holding only one basket of neatly nestled eggs, I described my ideal life: less stress, fewer eggs, fewer demands. More time for me. And I added, offhandedly, that I hate dropping my eggs because I'm such a perfectionist. It stemmed, I said, from a memory of a relative telling me, when I eagerly showed of my report card with all A's and B's, "You still ain't shit." "I've been trying to prove them wrong ever since," I said.
I suddenly remembered how those words only confirmed what I had long felt: that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make up for a nagging sense of inadequacy. And quietly, to my surprise, I began to cry. At first, those tears annoyed me. I'm a leader, I remember thinking. Leaders don't break down and cry in front of their colleagues. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the first "me" drawing was a reflection of how I'd always lived: deeply immersed in everything-whether family or my work or my sorority or some other organization. I was always doing something to keep from holding still. I felt as if I was a voyeur in what seemed to be a perfect life, and I was tired of working so hard to avoid what really ailed me.
What I thought really ailed me was a severe lack of confidence. It became even more pronounced whenever I took on a major challenge, and at the time of that retreat, several major challenges were converging. Despite a stellar resume listing major accomplishments at some of the nation's best newspapers and magazines, despite successfully running a nonprofit organization, despite a new husband and baby, I always felt I was perpetrating a fraud, that I didn't deserve the achievements or even the joy in my life. At home, I would rarely relax, and work was all-encompassing. I would go in early, stay late, skip lunch, hover over my computer for so long that my neck and shoulders ached. I rarely gave myself credit for being smart and creative and passionate, for thinking fast and leading and always striving to do the right thing. That lack of confidence was my Achilles' heel, and that relative's remark had kept it tender over the years. From time to time I would try to shore it up by working on the symptoms but not the disease. Assertiveness-training courses, public-speaking courses, management courses, skills-development workshops, leadership seminars, you name it. I polished my presentations and buffed my skills to the point where I seemed to brim with confidence. But I couldn't shake those feelings of not measuring up.
All along, I knew that what really ailed me was a profound sense of shame and embarrassment that had been a part of my life for years. I'd often think: There's something wrong with me, and I have to make up for it. There must be something wrong, because he chose me.
I was a precocious kid in the early 1970s, the older of two girls raised by a single mother in a working-class section of northwest Detroit. Mom somehow found the time and money from her job at the post office to allow my sister and me to enjoy dance lessons and Saturday bowling and summertime softball. I loved writing and dancing and singing in the school chorus. Family reunions would find me front and center in our all-kid talent revues.
Children were abundant in our sprawling but tight-knit clan; cousins often spent the night at one house or another. Mom never thought for a moment that her kids wouldn't be safe.
When I was about nine, my sister and I slept over with family in the country. There, an uncle whom I adored led me by the hand to a back room and rubbed my breasts and between my legs. The incident, as I now refer to it, lasted about five minutes. But it left an impact that I still contend with today.
Messin' with. Touching. Fondling. Groping. Molesting. Incest. Abuse. Assault. Rape. I did not know the words for what happened to me that night with my uncle as the rest of the family slept. Often when we think of being sexually attacked, we see the culprit as someone who pounces from the bushes, not someone who tucks us in. We think of broken bones, or scars, or blood. If there is no visible, physical injury, it can be difficult to see that a deliberate crossing of the boundaries of appropriate behavior is indeed a form of violence.
All I knew is that when my uncle touched me, it didn't feel right. I also knew, literally knew, that what had happened was wrong when he told me not to tell. If nobody could know, it must have been bad. And by extension, I thought, I must have been bad. With the offer of a few dollars, my uncle told me to keep it a secret. I didn't take the money, but I made his secret mine and carried it for more than ten years. My mother became severely ill not too long after I was molested, and as she spent months on a slow, painful process of recovery, I tried in my child's way to take care of the trauma that I had suffered so that I wouldn't burden her. I would attend family gatherings and carefully avoid my uncle, fighting the waves of embarrassment whenever he would try to strike up a conversation with me as if nothing had ever happened. Many holiday get-togethers are a blur to me today; my time at them was consumed not with enjoying my family but with a vigilant act of keeping a safe distance from the enemy-my uncle-while watching to make sure he didn't take my younger sister off into some room.
I was confused and ashamed, and I felt isolated and alone, as no one else seemed to notice my distress.
I learned to take care of myself, but I wasn't always my best ally. I reasoned that I should never do anything to invite attention because I might be "chosen" again. So I became quiet and withdrawn. The girl who once sang on the stage and danced and laughed began to hide in the shadow of a hideous secret. I even hid in plain view: One summer I wore a red windbreaker nearly every day to cover up my growing breasts. I became a model student, striving for perfection to make up for my perceived imperfections. My little girl's mind told me that my uncle had picked me because he knew I was stupid enough to go along with him. I repeated that to myself so much that it rang true.
For years that secret weighed me down. I remember believing that I had done something to deserve what happened, and even as I wrestled with the meaning of what had happened, I sometimes managed to convince myself that it was really no big deal. It only happened once, I'd say to myself, minimizing the experience. I now know why sometimes we are reluctant to see an assault that's sexual in nature as violence. The majority of sexual abuse survivors know their offenders, and abusers operate so smoothly and convincingly that they gain the trust of children without the use of force. And as so many survivors do, I allowed my life to be shaped by a secret that wasn't mine to bear.
If I had known that my uncle had no right to touch me and that I could tell on him, then I might have yelled or screamed that night. If I had known then that our society and our own Black culture conspire to keep children quiet and vulnerable and Black women quiet and exploited, I would have been able to throw his secret back in his face. If I had known how we as a people are still struggling with the crippling effects of slavery and racism, I would have understood that my family's silence after the secret came out was nothing personal. It was inspired by years of fear and oppression and passed on from one generation to the next.
But I didn't have a clue. There were unspoken rules in my family and "around the way"-rules I learned from watching others around me. I knew to respect, not question or challenge my elders. I knew that some stuff you just didn't air in mixed company. I knew that breasts and hips were acceptable objects for commentary, especially from boys and men. I was self-conscious about my newly forming curves. Maybe I'd asked for that uncle's attention by wearing my favorite short shorts, I reasoned. Maybe I'd tempted him by sitting on his lap. What's a nine-year-old to think? For that matter, what's a three-year-old or a sixteen-year-old to think when someone she loves, respects, trusts, and perhaps even fears uses those feelings against her?
You may find it difficult to understand how five minutes can forever affect the course of a life. Or you may see yourself in some part of my story. Those who have been sexually abused know all too well the residue of shame and helplessness that the experience leaves behind. Few of us can imagine the complex network of scars that sexual abuse can create-whether it is one touch or a number of intricate "games" or years of intercourse. For me, I only knew that I needed teachers and family and friends to tell me I was smart and make me feel that I mattered. And whenever I had the nerve to think so myself, that nine-year-old girl would emerge to remind me to think again.
When I was twenty-one and preparing to move to Boston and brave the world on my own, I finally told my mother and stepfather after they gently encouraged me to explain why I refused to go to my uncle's house for my own going-away party. My mother was supportive and calm, at least in front of me. She called her sister, my aunt, to share what I had told her. The uncle, of course, said I was lying. My parents were left to choose whom to believe. They chose me. After some heated exchanges, my mother told a few other people in the family, and that uncle was told not to come around whenever I would be present. Mothers quietly asked their daughters if the uncle had ever "bothered" them. No one else said he did. No one spoke to me again about what had happened, and whenever the family gathered after that, my uncle simply was not there.
I was so relieved that the secret was out, but I didn't realize until later the damage I suffered. The abuse, the silence, and the survival skills I learned as a result played a major role in shaping my personality and my habits today. Without professional help back then, I dealt with the repercussions on my own. I grew up with few girlfriends because I felt "different" and older than most kids my age, and I found it difficult to open up and trust. It was easier to spend time with boys, and later men, because responding to physical attraction was easier than developing and nurturing relationships. Sex with no commitment was OK, I reasoned in my younger, single years, because I was in control of whom I slept with. In reality, I was being used and robbed of pieces of myself. And all the while, whenever I found the time to be still, I'd feel the unsettling sense of shame creeping upon me. Keeping busy kept it at bay. For a long time I knew there was something wrong, but again, I focused on the symptoms and not the cause.
One time, about ten years ago, I tried to fix the symptoms. Citing stress and anxiety, I went to see a therapist I picked out of my insurance company's directory. We never got to the abuse. Whenever I talked about anything related to race, the therapist, who was White, would stare at me blankly. I remember telling her how painful it was to hear a White male newspaper colleague tell me that my ignorance of an obscure grammatical rule was the result of poor education. I should have been angry, yet I thought of my public schooling and heard that nine-year-old's voice say, See? I told you you were stupid, and I went home feeling defeated not by him but by myself. The therapist could offer nothing to counter my sense of humiliation, obviously not sensitive to the struggles of Blacks in White corporate America. I didn't stick around for long.
That day at the retreat, when the facilitator encouraged us to talk about our stress, I looked into the faces of my colleagues, Black women of all hues and shapes and sizes, and saw in their eyes that they understood just what it meant to work too hard, to juggle too much, to stretch too thin in search of perfection. In the cocoon of that sister circle, I felt comfortable enough to let my guard down, and the tears came from years of being tired and ashamed. Another sister cried too. Susan Taylor put her arm around my shoulder and reminded me, "We're so glad you're with us-you bring us so much." It was a compliment that I allowed myself to believe. Later I asked a coworker to recommend a good Black therapist for me to see.
It took twenty-five years for me to understand how five minutes of horror, in the shadow of a relative's house, could affect my life so deeply. I found a new therapist, a Black woman who understood my experience with corporate racism and who made me feel as if I was talking to a friend. With her help, I started to unravel the secret and feelings of shame and self-doubt from my life.
As I began to heal, I searched everywhere for information about abuse within families-Black families in particular.
Continues...
Excerpted from No Secrets No Lies by Robin Stone Copyright © 2004 by Robin D. Stone. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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