During the time when the minister was actively abusing me, two of my best friends confided that our new pastor had approached them sexually. The three of us were church buddies who shared all of our secrets. Both girls said they had rebuffed the man's advances, but had not told anybody else about the incidents. When asked, I lied and said that he hadn't approached me, but I felt awful! Why hadn't I fended him off like my friends had done? What was wrong with me? Of course, we were little kids and had no real power over the adult abuser, but apparently they were able to do what I could not. That may have been the beginning of me blaming myself for the horrors that followed.
When my father took up the abuse, this conviction was reinforced. I felt powerless. Apparently, everyone wanted to use me for sex, and I couldn't stop it. I didn't even try to say "no" to my dad. Years later, as a young adult, I was raped at knife-point in an empty lot near where my husband worked. Even then, I didn't put up much of a fight.
I've read stories from other survivors who were also victimized repeatedly as young people. I wonder if they also thought, as I did, "Why does this keep happening to me"? "Do I have a target on my back"? "Do I carry an invisible sign that says, 'rape me, abuse me, beat me, demean me'"? I suspect that we have all wondered, "WHY ME? I MUST BE DOING SOMETHING TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN!"
I recently got a great new perspective on this topic from this quote (which I lifted from the very excellent website, TAALK):
In her book The Socially Skilled Child Molester, Dr. Carla van Dam states that “Child molesters [also] gravitate to those people who are most likely to be too polite to fend them off, too shy and anxious to tell them to leave, too dependent to be assertive, and too impressed by rank, power, status or money to do the right thing. Child molesters deliberately associate with adults who cannot address these issues. They seek out adults who worry about hurting people’s feelings. They charm adults who do not believe it could happen.” When I read this and other passages from the book, I realized that I had been set up! My parents fit this profile perfectly! Dad wanted desperately to be revered as an intelligent and godly man, and Mom wanted desperately to be accepted by Dad and so reinforced his empirical rule. Our family was the perfect target for sexual predators! We children were to be deferential to all adults. We were not to say "no", not to ask "why", and never to disobey! We were not to express our own preferences. In our family we drank our coffee black, we ate our eggs sunny-side up, and we liked our steaks medium rare. If someone dared to show individual opinions or tastes, they knew that the punishment would be a lifetime of shunning and ridicule.
Enter the pedophile. And then enter the empirical and deluded father. And then enter the rapist. It wasn't that I had a target on my back. I didn't have a certain look, a precocious manner, a fatal flaw. I wasn't too pretty, too sexy, too clever. I was the perfect compliant child. I was smart enough to know the rules and to play them to perfection. And, in doing so, I became the perfect target.
My previous post was about anger. I feel anger as I write this. I also feel grateful that I had the skills and found the people who were willing to help me escape, to be safe, to grow, to mature, and to heal. I now know, in a deeper and more liberating way that, truly, IT WAS NOT MY FAULT!
Parents, civic and church leaders, and helping professionals might find "The Socially Skilled Child Molester," helpful. I know that that there are many other great resources as well, and I'd love to have you share ones you have found with me in the "comments" section.
The TAALK website is also a great source. The more we know and the more we share, the more able we will be to stop the epidemic of childhood sexual abuse.
