Faith Born of Seduction. Jennifer L Manlowe

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      Re-offended Later in Life

      Many child-victims cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in an environment of seductive and sometimes violent control is not well suited to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems regarding bodily boundaries, basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. Living in a patriarchal and offending culture (whether she lives alone or not) means there is no place outside of her fear; there are no gender-neutral domains or violence-free spaces.⁹⁶ For all these reasons, the adult survivor is at great risk of repeated victimization in adult life.

       “Were you ever abused later in life?”

      Haddock told me:

      When I was about twenty-three a guy exposed himself to me. I was waiting for the bus to go back to school; I had been in a job interview. When I was twenty-six some guys that my mom said were our cousins took me and my sister to the beach. One of the guys pinned me down and I was knocked unconscious—I don’t—I remember kind of coming to—I—I was having my period, I had a Tampax in there. I couldn’t get that tampon out for three days. And J apologized to him, I said, “Jerry, I’m not gonna sleep with you tonight. My sister needs me.”

      When Haddock went into her sister’s room to tell her that she had been raped, her sister responded, “You deserved it.” Blaming the victim of a sex crime is certainly common, but when one experiences such blame from a family member the pain and alienation it produces goes even deeper.

      Cherise told me of the time she met a street artist who, in her words, “was absolutely gorgeous.” She said he was especially sweet to her and seemed to be a very sensitive man. She later found out that he was a rapist.

      He was a pathological liar. After he raped me he said, “Well, what are you gonna do? I mean, who’s gonna believe you—you should be glad to even have someone like me.” On one level I thought he was right. And then on the other level—this was—this is rape, you know, and so I just lived in this confused state, and this is where the whole body images come, because, I, you know, was obese at the time. So I didn’t have a sense of ownership of my body, I was like, “Well maybe he’s right; I mean how could I ever expect to get a gorgeous man like this?” Never mind that this man refused to be seen with me in public.

      Note how Cherise felt a double bind: “On one level he was right” (she was obese and so felt worthy of abuse) and on the other, “this was rape.” Cherise reveals a belief held by almost every woman I interviewed, and that is “if I am thin I’m invulnerable.” Thinness seems to be a magical defense against violation; it can even give one the illusion that she is “undeserving” of rape.

      Janine was date-raped by a man who was a member of an Adult Children of Alcoholics Anonymous group. She reported feeling deeply betrayed by him: “I cared about him and he violated my trust. The day after the rape, I had my first images of my dad sadistically torturing me. I cried as I wrote my ex-friend that I couldn’t see him any more because no one was ever going to hurt me again the way my dad hurt me. I got into a therapy group for incest survivors because of all this.”

      When Margery was in graduate school she had a football player sneak up on her in the dark and attempt to rape her. She says, “I screamed so loud that I fell backward and he ran like hell.” Five years later Margery was raped by a minister she was dating. She said, “One day he got so angry at me that he pushed me down and anally raped me. That’s when all of my history of abuse with my grandfather surfaced. I was a wreck.” A common theme that emerged among several of the survivors interviewed was to have a sexual crime in adulthood trigger flashbacks of their sexually abusive childhoods.

      Renita illustrates how disconnected she feels to her sexuality and how such a disconnection leaves her open to being used as an object—a common result of childhood sexual abuse. “When Don and I had sex I kind of felt like he used my body for his pleasure—I would just space out while he was trying to get off on me. I didn’t even know this was unusual until I told my therapist. And to say it out loud, now, is so scary [whisper].” The risk of rape, sexual harassment, or battering, though high for all women, is approximately doubled for survivors of childhood sexual abuse.⁹⁷ In Diana Russell’s study of women who had been incestuously abused in childhood, two-thirds were subsequently raped.⁹⁸

      Classic psychoanalytic theory has commonly portrayed a woman’s repeated victimizations as clear signs of her inherent masochism. The earlier belief was that these women not only enjoyed physical pain but were addicted to repeated abuse.”⁹⁹ In reality, repeated abuse is not actively sought but is passively experienced as a dreaded but unavoidable fate, accepted as the inevitable price of a relationship. As a result of revictimization in adult life, many survivors experience even greater physical and emotional trauma, lower self-esteem, and a heightened risk of HIV and other infections due to unprotected sex.

      Many survivors have extreme deficiencies in self-protection and self-valuation and as such are left with a feeling of a paralysis of will. Because they lack the self-worth, basic communication skills, and experience necessary to set and maintain appropriate limits with sexual partners, they feel they have no option but to tolerate abuse. In the case of Cherise, when her perpetrating father became ill she felt she had to minister to his wishes and needs. Haddock also claimed that if her father wanted her to have sex with him today, she could not say no: “I couldn’t refuse him today if he made a pass at me because of the kind of power he still holds over me.”

      A well-learned dissociative coping style leads survivors to ignore or minimize social cues that would ordinarily alert them to danger.¹⁰⁰ As a result they may repeatedly find themselves in vulnerable situations until they find a safe community or empowering relationships. Supportive and politically active connections may enable them to reconnect to their agent-centered selves and learn that they have rights that must be respected.

      3

      A Pyrrhic Victory: Contemplating the Physical Cost of Surviving

       Eating Disorders and Incest

      Anorexia and bulimia are multilayered problems that have no singular cause. Psychological and social factors are generally thought to play key roles in their development. Many psychologists and psychiatrists believe these disorders arise in the context of a process of growing up which has gone awry. A young woman’s response to biological maturity and the psychological and social demands of sexual development are widely invoked as being especially relevant.¹ Child sexual abuse is now recognized as a common occurrence² with consequences that affect self-esteem, sexual identity, personal competence, and potential for intimacy. A link between such experience and later eating/body-image preoccupations is therefore highly plausible.

      As I have said earlier, sporadic accounts³ in the psychiatric literature of eating disorders reveal that as many as five out of six patients in anorexia nervosa treatment programs⁴ and seven out of ten bulimic⁵ college women revealed histories of sexual abuse before age twelve. Of the self-selected sample of incest survivors with eating disorders whom I have interviewed, all were initially sexually abused before age eight and all have revealed that this history has set the stage for their distorted relationship to appetite cues (for both sex and food), a sense of autonomy and personal agency, and body-size and shape perception. There are in fact important links of meaning in the survivor’s mind between her incest experience and her subsequent eating disorder.⁶

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