Sometimes, the reaction of adults to a child’s sexual abuse is more harmful to the child than the actual abuse. This was certainly true in my case and the cases of several others whom I know.
I have described my first molestation in a previous post. It occured at swimming lessons when I was ten years old in 1968. I was also molested several times by an older male family member (NOT my father) over the next two years. I never told anyone about the first incident and it wouldn’t have had much of an effect on me if the perpetrator hadn’t threatened me at the end with killing my parents. I was terrified by that. Six months later, my father died in an airplane accident and though I told myself that there was no connection, in the back of my mind, there was.
As I say, however, were it not for that final threat, it wouldn’t have been a very traumatic event for me. I knew it was wrong, but I also knew it wasn’t my fault. I would have been okay. Later, however, I was molested by an older male relative. Once again, it wasn’t particularly traumatic and I felt no guilt or shame for it. I did eventually report it to my mother, whose reaction was to make a phone call to the family memeber. The molestation ended and that was that. Nothing more was heard or said.
A few years later, however, it was learned that he had simply moved on to molesting a younger brother of mine. This time, however, when it was revealed, the shit hit the fan. My brother was embarrassed and shamed by the incident as my mother went ballistic. The man died of a heart attack a few days later. For years after, my brother was haunted, not by the molestations, but by the public humiliation of exposire, the fury of my mother at our relative, and the declarations that he had been “messed up” by the incidents. Well, yes, he was messed up and spent years in self-destructive behavior from which he emerged only a few years ago. It has taken him decades to recover and he has done so with great success and at great credit to himself. However, it was not the molestation that “messed him up,” but the reaction to it.
I think I have always been gay. People tell me (and looking back, I see remember feelings and see indications of my orientation well before the molestations I experienced) that I was probably always gay. However, my mother made a comment to me after the death of my relative that he might have “ruined” me had he been allowed to continue. She has never explained what she meant by that, but I know she was referring to being gay and it devastated me to hear that. I knew at 14, when she made that comment, that I was gay and it killed my soul to know that my mother thought I was “ruined.” It also amazed me that she hadn’t been able to see what apparently everyone else had, that I was gay long before then.
However, what also devastated me was the reaction to my brother’s molestations. It was not that I wanted a big deal to have been made about MY molestation. Indeed, I was, and am, profoundly grateful a big deal WASN’T made. But, why was my mother so much more upset when it happened to my brother and not when it happened to me? Why did she feel she had to explode and make a scene over my brother’s experience and not mine? Was it because she really did know I was gay, or that she blamed me for the molestation, or that it just wasn’t a big deal if the molestation happened to me? Why was it so much worse in her mind when it happened to my brother? THAT was what messed me up. That and the idea that she considered me ruined.
In watching and reading stories about child abuse, over and over I wonder what trauma that victim or survivor is going through at the hands of supposedly well-meaning adults who are reacting with anger and horror and other similar emotions. Do people realize they are simply adding to the trauma? Do they care?
There are varying degrees of abuse and I in no way want to condone or excuse child abuse. What I DO want to do is to caution people not to over-react to it, because you can cause more harm by doing so than the original perpetrator. Of course, there are those who make a living through the over-reacting to it and they will do what they can to blow it out of proportion. But, don’t victimize the child twice. Don’t add to it. Punish the perpetrator if you must. But keep the reaction in proportion and don’t lead the child to believe that they are responsible or have been “ruined” or “messed up” or something similar. Don’t lead the child to believe that they are now broken.
Don’t join the perpetrator in adding to the child’s pain.
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