The Dark Children's Gift That Keeps On Giving

In light of the recent child sex scandal at Penn State and Sheldon Kennedy’s appearance before a senate sub-committee in Washington, I want to talk about child abuse. I consider it to be the single greatest scourge in our world today.

In the interest of full disclosure, I was the victim of pedophiles twice before I reached my teens. The first was at the hands of a babysitter when I was barely six years old. The second was at the hands of an Anglican priest when I was eleven.

Let me try and explain what happens to child who is a victim of those who look on children as merely opportunities for sexual gratification.

The first thing you feel is fear.

You are alone, confused by what is being done to you and you are terrified. You don’t fully understand what is happening but you know instinctively that it is wrong. You are afraid because your world is being turned inside out by something so alien to everything you thought it was that you have no way to reconcile that moment with your real life.

That moment, as you are being betrayed by an adult, someone you have been taught to believe will protect you, becomes the only life you have.

As it is happening, you don’t know how it will end or what will become of you. Time is frozen. You are alone inside yourself, cut off from your family, your life and even yourself. You are lost and feel abandoned. You have never known before the fear you feel at that moment. You are afraid you will be killed. You are afraid you won't die. In those moments, nothing exists except fear.

The fear is real. The fear is rational. It is irrational and the fear lasts long after the incident.

Not fully understanding what has happened, you are relieved to have survived but almost immediately become afraid of discovery. Perhaps the person who molested you will hurt you again if you tell anyone or even if you don’t, perhaps they  will do it to you again. Perhaps there are others who will do the same thing to you.

Perhaps no one will believe you if you tell and you will be punished for lying about an adult. Perhaps your family and close friends will think it is your fault if you do tell. Perhaps it actually is your fault.

You feel shame for something you didn’t cause and you feel guilt for allowing it to happen, for being afraid and for not having the courage to have defended yourself or for telling anyone. It is an overwhelming combination of shame and guilt and fear that eventually leads too many of us to keep it our dirty, dark secret.

That confusion disrupts your life with your family who do not know the shameful secret you carry and it isolates you from them and everyone else. You live two lives. You live the real life with your secret and your pretend life with those around you.

You see yourself as alone in a world where you are surrounded by people you don’t trust, people who can hurt you and people you love but believe won’t love you if they learn the truth about you. The secret that is hurting you becomes the secret you must protect.

Adult concepts that you don’t understand have been imposed on you and you have no context or experience from which to find understanding. You lose the ability to trust those around you and never quite feel safe except when you are alone. You assume responsibility for what happened and as a result, you also assume the guilt and the shame that goes with it. Those feelings along with fear become constant companions who accompany you daily and always, just below the surface of your life is the anxiety and anger those feelings cause and to which you devote a considerable amount of energy to deny and control.

As you grow older, you learn to push the emotions and the memories down deep where you can't see them every day believing you have dealt with it all but you are wrong. Those emotions and memories take up residence in your subconscious where they work on your mind like an undiagnosed cancer works on a body. You are a prisoner of that unresolved trauma you have buried in your subconscious and it influences how you see life and the others in your life. You aren't consciously aware of the power the secret has on how you live but it influences every decision you make and it colours your perceptions.

It dictates how you respond to personal and professional relationships. In many cases, it evolves into clinical depression causing some to become erratic and inconsistent in how they behave. It often leads to compulsive behaviour, driven by a need to be preoccupied in order to escape the darkness below the surface of your life. Some become workaholics, some turn to substance abuse or other addictions. Many become even more seriously mentally ill and in some cases when the weight becomes unbearable, it eventually leads to suicide.

It never stops because the sexual abuse of a child is the gift that keeps on giving.

You live as an adult in one world but that world is ruled by a wounded child inside you that never grows up, a wounded child that lives in a secret world. It is the wounded child within yourself that drives how you see life and how you live it.

Without extensive therapy, the residual effect of child abuse can destroy a life that had every right to be lived to its maximum potential. Pedophiles justify their actions with honeyed words and phrases like “child love” but there is nothing loving about using a child to satisfy your own sexual pleasure. The only word that applies is rape. Pedophiles don't just rape the body of a child. They rape that child's mind and the life that child is going to live.

Pedophiles are cowards. They are predators who live in the shadows and who prey on the defenseless. Some, but not many, are themselves the victims of pedophiles. Some, but not many, are mentally ill. In the end, most are sociopaths without regard or empathy for anyone else and who can too easily justify their abuses with self-serving logic and rationalizations.

One in five children who are abused, die every day.

Regardless of our political, religious, cultural or economic circumstances, we all share something in common. We were all children once. Most made it through to being adults without becoming the victims of sexual predators. Tragically, too many haven’t.

The Internet has opened up a world of opportunity for pedophiles and that has led to a significant increase in the sexual abuse of children. We aren’t doing much about it; we’re too busy arguing about politics.

Anonymous recently bragged about shutting down a pedophile rings’ web sites for 24 hours. They might just as well have done nothing.  Children abused and who will subsequently be abused, would have been better served if Anonymous had turned the site addresses over to Interpol instead of grandstanding for a day.

As for me?

I was one of the lucky ones. I crashed and almost died as a result but it led to ripping open my subconscious and that led to unraveling and resolving the destructive guilt and fear I had carried for so long. It led to the wounded child inside me growing up and that gave me the life I should have been allowed to live all along.

I don’t worry about the damage it did to me, I am thankful for the life I now have but in my heart, I grieve for those children who have been abused and will not have the second chance I received and I grieve for those children who have yet to be abused.

Almost all of us love our children and seek to protect them. We buy car seats and bicycle helmets and try to keep them safe but we too often become so busy in our lives that we fail to see the broader world of children, the dark world too many live in. We forget that all children, not just ours, are not toys. They are part of us. They are our future and every child is the responsibility of all of us to try and protect.

LINKS

Yet another Internet child porn ring busted
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europol-says-child-pornography-ring-busted-19-men-arrested-in-denmark/2011/12/16/gIQAX3ymxO_story.html

Thrivers Against Abuse
http://mamaduck123456.blogspot.com/

Archetype In Action
http://www.archetypeinaction.com/index.php

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