“I kept my daughter away from her uncle since then.”
“Keeping that uncle away from all daughters and sons should have been the way,” I replied back to my client’s mother, a few years back, when she told me that her daughter was abused by her uncle, her father’s brother.
This client of mine was battling trust issues with men in her twenties and it was traced back to her teenage. She was intimated by the uncle, and hushed by the mother, was never heard or understood or supported, and all she could end up was with insecurities.
Why did she suffer, and not the abuser? Something to ponder on, isn’t it?
Because her mother chose for the victim to suffer, and leave the predator free to wander. If the mother had called out abuse, many more girls would have been saved, and her daughter wouldn’t be so traumatized.
The victim is generally called a survivor in our society. But what did she survive? The abuse?
What do my current Female Clients say about childhood Sexual Abuse?
1. I was too scared to open my mouth.
2. What’s the point in telling my mother that my father abused me, she worships him.
3. Nobody will ever believe me if I tell them that my brother forced a blow job on me because I was the black sheep of the family, and he the rank holder.
What do my Male Clients say about Sexual Abuse?
1. Nobody believed a boy could be molested by another man.
2. I would pretend to sleep so that the pain didn’t increase.
3. Initially it was hurtful later I enjoyed it. Now as an adult, I can’t have sex with a woman.
The narrative is still unaltered. Victims don’t complain and predators walk on the streets freely. If victims manage to gather some courage to complain, then they are silenced by the family members and the society, in order to maintain the family decorum and societal image.
One, out of every three rape victims in India, is a child. The seminal imprints of sexual abuse on a child’s psyche are profoundly traumatic. And most of it goes unnoticed and thus remains untreated.
When I spoke to a client, she was trying to painfully extricate herself from nightmares of being sexually abused by her step-father, which she deliberately hid from her mother, to protect the mother from the sadness of being cheated on. This kind of family behaviour marks the brazen impunity with which people with authority can dodge such crimes while leaving indelible scars on one’s childhood.
And what happens to the child who goes through this
If a child isn’t able to use words to express the ongoing trauma, please check her/his body language. The psyche of a traumatised child needs holistic and sensitive healing, while the sexual predators need to be exposed publicly and thus punished. We shouldn’t brush aside such topics, in the fear of being abandoned and bashed by the society.
Though peripheral to the plot of the movie, it was in Mira Nair’s Monsoon, that Naseeruddin Shah gave an ear to the victim and punished the predator on spot, though after years. That’s what we adults need to do. That’s how we need to stand up. That’s how we need to protect our kids and make them stronger. That’s how the society may change some day. That’s how the world may some day become a better place for our children.
By Jaseena Backer
Jaseena Backer is an author and a psychologist. She has been working and writing on parenting for the past 25 years.
She can be contacted at backer.jaseena@gmail.com
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