Faith Born of Seduction. Jennifer L Manlowe

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      In the case of Natalie, she is not able to recall the full details of what happened to her, which is far more common in incest reporting.

      I’m not sure exactly when my dad started molesting me. It could have been even in infancy, but I know it was going on when I was about three, and possibly up through five, six, maybe later than that. So I’m not really sure about when it started and when it ended but I know it was happening when I was three, four, five . . . and the way that I know is because I’ve gotten in touch with that part of me that has body memories. And that’s how old I am at that—at that stage.

      Many survivors can remember detailed images, feelings, sounds, smells, and tastes as clearly as though the abuse were happening in the moment. Most find their memories to be confusing and vague. Important parts of the story may be missing, and survivors may have difficulty putting the pieces together to form a complete narrative with an accurate time sequence. Although traumatic childhood memories are deeply engraved, they are not stored or retrieved in the same way as ordinary memories. Many survivors have a period of amnesia after the abuse, followed by delayed recall. In a recent, careful follow-up study of two hundred women with documented childhood histories of sexual abuse, one in three did not remember the abuse twenty years later. In 1992, a well-funded organization called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation sprung up arguing that victims of sexual abuse are brainwashed to think they are victims by their support groups and overzealous therapists. Such a group takes the spotlight off alleged perpetrators and places it back on victims of sexual crimes in the family—a familiar focus that keeps the cycle of public and family denial in place.⁴²

      Samantha also has a vague sense of her incest experience,

      I think my abuse was—I think it must have been when I was really, really little. Something happened where I was penetrated orally and vaginally while my diapers were being changed, I think by my nanny—like I have this image of a screaming baby. I mean it’s a feeling of terror, you know? Another time, when I was twelve, I can even remember the dress I was wearing. I remember my mom saying to my father, “Samantha is growing breasts.” My father got this look on his face that I—you know, once I remembered it, I see it before me. It—this sort of [long pause] ecstatical—it was, you know ecstatic happiness, sort of, “Oh, look, I am going to be a really bad little boy here.” I don’t know, I can’t explain it. And he came over and felt my breasts.

      With a deep sense of despair, Samantha sighed, “My whole life has been affected as a result of abuse, and it’s hard to know whether the damage was mostly sexual, physical, or emotional, because all of it went on.”

      Women who abuse children in their care often are reenacting their own abuse or are expressing hostility or projected self-hatred.⁴³ Other mothers, like Samantha’s, do not directly abuse the child but facilitate the abuse of their daughters by the men in their family and minimize the offenses against them by normalizing sexual objectification in the family. Samantha’s mother would often bring her son into the bathroom when Samantha was showering. Her claim was that she “knew he would be curious about girls someday” and that “it was okay to take a peek at his sister instead.” Other mothers of the survivors interviewed were unable to recognize their role in silencing the child who was suffering incest. Note the case of Janine:

      When I was four, I was sexually molested, digitally, by my babysitter (a sixteen-year-old male neighbor) and that was my first experience, as far as I can remember. I was also subsequently mauled by my uncle and my dad in sexual ways. My dad was the most offensive. He always made comments and innuendos about my sexual appeal to him; even when I was ten years old he would ask me to try on clothes and string bikinis and model them for him. At other times he would have me perform sexy dance routines. I don’t really have memories of not feeling like a sexual object. Of course, my mother was numb to it.

      Estrangement between mother and daughter leaves the daughter emotionally vulnerable and without adequate support and protection.

       Broken Trust—Felt Powerlessness

      Who could abuse a child? A sexual offender is someone in a position of power or authority who exploits that power by manipulating, by seducing, and by sexually invading one less powerful than him or herself. This violating of boundaries and trust can wreak havoc on a child’s perception of herself and her world. When a child is given the message that the older people who know her will love her and protect her, and then instead an older, trusted member of her family abuses her and no adult validates the reality of this assault, the child’s sense of reality becomes distorted. Such a distortion is narcissistically and socially wounding. A feeling of powerlessness ensues because no one will hear or protect her from the ongoing abuse. The child who has been sexually abused is harmed further if she tells someone and is not believed. She is doubly wounded if she is encouraged to trust in God for her safety. (See more about the devastating role of paternalistic theology in chapters 5 and 6.)

      The child who is being sexually assaulted is trapped in a private, impossibly confusing world that gives no validation to the crime of the incest experience. The incestuous intruder into the child’s private world is “like a monster that inhabits her closet: He threatens her only when she is alone, and she must find her own ways of coping with his overpowering presence.”⁴⁴

       “Regarding your abuse, any idea whether anyone else knew about it?”

      Cherise told me that the only people who knew about her father’s abusiveness have died: “My mother committed suicide when I was seven years old; she was twenty-eight.” After the successful suicide attempt by Cherise’s mother, her father told her, “Your momma was crazy, and she jumped into Lake Erie, and she’s dead. And we’ll never ever speak about her again.” Cherise told me that his sexual and physical abuse of her began very quickly after her mother’s suicide: “Every day he began with degradation rituals.” At these times her father would molest, beat, and rape Cherise and then degrade her with a litany of abusive remarks about her body size. Cherise remembers how her grandmother would threaten her father, and felt especially protected from her father when her grandmother was around. She told me she would never forget the day her grandmother died: “But I remember when I was ten, finding out from my father that my grandmother had a heart attack. And—and it was like the gates of hell had opened. I knew it was—this is it, I’m dead—I knew I was dead ... it was like the one person that was protecting me was gone.” Cherise told me her childhood was full of loss, “first my mother, then my grandmother, and to be left alone with my father—my father was psychotic.” Cherise later found out from her cousins that her mother was her father’s third wife, and that all had committed suicide. She added to her list of loss when she said, “My brother also jumped off a bridge into the same lake my mother did. I’m convinced he took his life as a result of residual effects of years of abuse, absolute years of abuse.”

      Natalie recalls her fathers’s abuse through “body memories.” She claims, “I know that I was sexually molested by my dad as a child. I don’t have cognitive memories of it but I’ve had a lot of body memories of it. I tend to think that my mom was kind of turning her back on it.” Janine remembers a time when her nine-year-old brother and his friends pulled down her pants in a kind of “we’ll-show-you-ours-if-you-show-us-yours” game. She says,

      I remember running home crying like I was going to go to hell for sure, and I remember telling my mom that this happened, and my mom said, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell your father.” And, it was interesting that it was assumed that J really was bad and, like a good Catholic, I got the message that I was sinful. She gave me the feeling that I am bad and that she’ll keep it our little secret. Anything that sexually happened to me or was wrong would have been blamed on me. I got that message very early. СКАЧАТЬ