A tale of a child abuse survivor
It seems you can’t turn on a TV these days without hearing about childhood abuse. References to “the dysfunctional family” are so common they are almost a cliché. But behind the cliché is the sad reality: some families are poisonous for children. Childhood abuse, particularly when severe, can cast a long shadow over your life influencing your emotional state, and how you relate to others. Even when not abusive, families can be dysfunctional in other ways, such as having a chronically depressed, mentally ill or substance-abusing parent.
If you were raped as a child, you experienced one of the nastiest and most terrifying wounds a child can bear. I suspect I don’t need to tell you that, but you may be in need of some validation. You may have heard sentiments such as “try not to think about it” or “leave it in the past.” If only it was that easy, right? But there are very sound reasons why this is much easier said than done, and we’ll look at that some more below. If you are new to acknowledging and dealing with child-rape, please know that you can heal too.
Child abuse is something that is always shushed up in the name of “what will the society think?” “What will happen if no one’s wants to marry you ECT.” How would you feel if your whole childhood has only been about depression and sexual abuse? Scary to even imagine a childhood like that isn’t it. There are en-number of cases that just go unnoticed in front o law. Abuse that happens at a tender age haunts the survivor (would not like to term them as victims) till their grave. In order to make you understand how it feels to be in the shoes of the survivor I would like to just narrate a small story.
Mummy and Daddy, Auntie Uncle were here for supper and they brought me a five-year diary for when I grow up. I wasn’t feeling very good as I’m getting 2 new teeth and they sure hurt but everyone was making such a fuss, cause I’m a yr old that I was trying to be as happy as I could. The diary was a present for when I grew up. I threw the diary away when I grew up. I ripped off the cover and I tore out the pages.
When I was eight, Uncle came and stayed with us at, while my father was out-of-town. My brother and I called him My Favorite Uncle. He was not our uncle. He was not our father’s brother. He was not our mother’s brother. He was a friend of our parents. He was not a friend. The house where our family lived had three bedrooms, one for my mom and dad, one for my brother, and one for me. My bedroom was at the end of the hallway, across the hall from my brother’s room. The man we called Uncle stayed in my bedroom. He slept in my twin bed. My twin bed, with the pink covers. Mom ordered the pale pink Bedspread with ruffles around the bottom and matching curtains from mom. I thought my mother knew everything when I was eight. She knew when I took cookies out of the pantry in the kitchen, even when she wasn’t in the same room. She knew when I was lying, and she knew what I was thinking. I thought she knew what happened behind closed doors. I knew not to talk to strangers. My mother trusted the man we called Uncle. He was my Uncle. He gave me a five-year diary when I was born. His name is written in my baby book. Uncle is not a stranger. My mother trusts him. I trust him. He is in my bed room. If my Uncle is trusted to be in my bedroom then whatever he does must be okay. I am in my bedroom with my Uncle. My bedroom door is closed. He is sitting in the chair to my desk. The back of the chair is leaning against the door. No one can come in and see what he is doing. No one can go out. The door was blocked. I wanted to open it. I saw the doorknob on the right hand side of the door. He is my Uncle. I trust him. I know that my mother trusts him. He has a book he wants to show me. It has drawings of woman wearing nightgowns and underpants. The underpants have no bottoms. There is a big hole in the bottom of them. You can go to the bathroom without having to pull your panties down. While I was looking at the book on his lap he opened the zipper to his pants. He took my hand and put it on the top of him. I didn’t know I shouldn’t have touched him. No one told me. He wanted to keep the book a secret. He wanted to show me the book again in the evening. He told me to sleep in my brother’s room instead of with my mom. He told me to wear two piece pajamas, and to wait for him. He will come and get me in the middle of the night. The chair is moved, I opened the door. I kept the secret. I slept on the outside edge of my brother’s bed and I waited for him.
Such is the trauma of child abuse, either the child goes off into a deep depression or comes out of the nightmare and leads a normal life of every normal (term used by the society) person lives. We as survivors need is someone to whom we can talk to and do not sympathize just show some empathy. There has to be a gender approach in the analysis of rape committed against children of both sexes. Analyzing rape from a gender social relations perspective, with power a crosscutting feature, one understands how rape becomes something natural, especially when committed in the family context, permitting a break with a fatalist and banal view of the evil.
Addressing the question in this way points us to a child’s human rights perspective, based on the fundamental principle that the child is a rights holder and as such must be protected. The research showed quite clearly that if rape is a sensitive problem for everyone, it is often tolerated (and “undeclared”) and means, for example, that denunciation is left to the families even when legally it is a crime.
Child rape is thus a brutal manifestation of how a social construction of gender identities is structured by a model of masculinity and femininity that makes sexual bodies conform to social control, that’s punishes/blames/exonerates depending on what is culturally recognized as acceptable or not.
