Too often, the crime element in sexual assault gets overlooked, ignored, or pushed away. Too often, the victims feel they're guilty for seeking justice. And how many six-year-old boys will insist they were raped when adults tell them, "You have too active an imagination," or "Your cousin couldn't have done something terrible like that."
That throws a heavy burden on the survivors. As bad or possibly worse is when the victims keep silent, which allows the perpetrator to continue the assaults.
I never told anyone about my two perpetrators. Although I was too young to reason it out, my adult voice says, "It wouldn't have done any good."
As one of victims at the trial of Jerry Sandusky said, "Who would believe a kid?"
Or perhaps shame held me back. The old man who molested me hugged me and told me what a good kid I was. "You're special," he said, which were words I yearned to hear, and yet, deep inside I think I knew they were false.
Or maybe I didn't want the abuse to be real. I was so starved for attention and affection, I blamed myself.
What if I had spoken up? What if my parents had believed me? To speculate on that doesn't do any good and my perpetrators are both dead.
And I, the victim, paid for their crimes.
1 comment:
Roger sent me an email with these comments:
I never realized until I was in my late 20's early 30's that what happened to me was a crime. It was just my life, the way I was raised and there wasn't anything in the news really about such things back then. Or if there were it was off my radar.
I distinctly remember someone talking about someone in the news around the early 80's getting sent to jail for something similar. That really sobered me up and made me take a look at what happened to me in different light. Still since it happened within my family it seemed different than if some stranger had attacked some other child. It was like "well that would be awful but since it was dad or a brother or sister it would be different'. Like there was some law that made it ok within the family but against someone not related that would be a crime.
How mixed up and perverted one can become when living with insanity and insanity becomes normal. I am just glad I learned different eventually and began to take what happened to me seriously. It was the first painful step to healing.
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