Invisible Girls Read online

  Dear Dr. Patti,

  My uncle molested me and several of my cousins for years until one day my cousin (his daughter) couldn’t take it anymore and told her mom. There was this big court case and he actually went to jail for a short time because I told and then five other cousins came forward, too. All of us had been molested by him before we were even teenagers. When he was arrested he said “he just couldn’t help himself.” What is a pedophile and what makes someone a pedophile or a child molester?

  Signed,

  Confused and Hurt

  Dear Confused and Hurt,

  First of all, there is no consensus on what makes a child molester. There are a variety of opinions as to why. What we do know is that these are men who seek out children. Some are homosexuals and seek out only boys. In our book we are looking specifically at men who sexually abuse girls. Many men who abuse children were abused in some way when they were younger. People who work with pedophiles tell us that these men may have felt they could not express themselves, that they felt they had no power except their power over someone much smaller. Sexual abuse is about sexual gratification, but it is also very much about power and manipulation. What we do know is that statistics tell us that 96 percent of sexual abuse is perpetrated by men.

  Pedophilia is described as a condition of having deep sexual urges for children, but many, many pedophiles have sexual relations with adults, too. A father or uncle who abuses a daughter may still be having sex with his wife, for example.

  In her book Sleeping with a Stranger, Patricia Wiklund describes sexual molesters as men who feel repressed and inadequate. They are morally and sexually indiscriminate. They have no conscience. I often find that molesters want us to feel sorry for them. That certainly seems to have been the case with your uncle when he whined that he couldn’t help himself. What you need to remember is that it is never the survivor’s fault. All the blame is with the abuser.

  Dear Dr. Patti,

  I moved here from Trinidad when I was five years old. Many of my relatives still live in Trinidad and often come to visit in the summertime. The summer when I was nine years old, one of my visiting cousins started molesting me. He was sixteen when it started and each summer he would do more stuff to me. He was always very nice to me and I kind of liked the attention, but then he would make me touch his genitals and masturbate him. I was very confused. In a way it excited me, but it also scared me and made me feel weird.

  He never penetrated me, but he performed oral sex on me and he made me perform oral sex on him. The oral sex made me gag and sometimes I even vomited after. He was a very loved family member and I never told anyone. It stopped the summer I turned fourteen; my cousin was in college by then and had stopped coming to the States. I am now nineteen and having a hard time sexually. I find myself turned off by sex and scared. Is this normal? Was I sexually abused? Was it incest? Is something wrong with me because it felt good to me sometimes?

  Signed,

  Confused and Scared

  Dear Confused and Scared,

  Yes, you were most definitely abused, and, yes, it was incest. Any sexual contact between family members (or any adult figure you consider a family member) is incest. Your cousin knew better than to molest a nine-year-old girl. Girls who are being abused often get really confused when their bodies respond positively, but our bodies are stimulated by touch and the fact that you liked this cousin would probably only add to that.

  There is absolutely nothing wrong with you! As you will learn throughout the book, our bodies sometimes respond to touch and genital stimulation. It does not mean that you wanted sex when you were nine.

  I don’t know all the details of your family, but I’m assuming you didn’t feel safe telling a parent. I understand. Often girls are afraid that if they tell a parent they will be blamed. Many girls also tell me that they are afraid of sex after any form of sexual abuse. They don’t know whom or what to trust. Remember, it’s okay to just explore romance at your age. Most girls go on to have good, healthy sexual relationships after abuse, but it can take some time.

  You do not have to have sex with someone you are dating. You are in charge and you can set the pace. If you do start dating, you can tell the guy you want to go very slowly.

  If you have a trusted friend or adult you can speak to about what happened with your cousin, I encourage you to do so. You may also want to call the RAINN hotline or try some counseling. The more you talk about it, the better you’ll feel (see Chapter 8 for more about sexual abuse by brothers, uncles, cousins, and stepfathers).

  Dear Dr. Patti,

  I am seventeen years old and go to high school in suburban Chicago. I have been dating my boyfriend for the past five months. I am a virgin and want to stay that way for now, but we just began to have oral sex. I did not like going down on him very much, but I agreed to do it a couple of times. Last week we were at his house and we both were drinking. I think he was a bit drunk and while I was giving him head I started gagging. I stopped and he was very upset and begged me to “finish what I started.” I said no and he pushed my head down forcefully. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. He forced me to make him ejaculate. I was shocked. I never knew he was like that. I felt so vulnerable at the time; it was horrible. I felt like I was a toy and he could do anything he wanted with me.

  I thought he loved me. I guess I was wrong. I hate loving somebody who doesn’t really love me back. I could not seem to get him out of my mind and I chalked it up to his being drunk. Even though he did this to me and he did not apologize, I went out with him again. The next time we were alone he did the same thing, but this time I tried to fight and pull my mouth off his penis. He pushed my head so hard I could not move or breathe. He would not let go of my head and shoulders to the point where I started gagging and actually vomited. I felt a mixture of disgust and embarrassment. He threw me off of him in disgust. We broke up after this last incident and I feel really gross about what happened. Did I get sexually abused? Is this date rape even though he did not force intercourse on me?

  Signed,

  Nauseous and Disappointed

  Dear Nauseous and Disappointed,

  First of all, let me say how sorry I am about what happened with this boyfriend. Many girls talk about feeling nauseous performing oral sex on guys. There is a lot of pressure out there these days for girls to perform oral sex. No girl needs to agree to this if she does not want to. I should add that if you do not use a condom during oral sex, you are susceptible to sexually transmitted diseases. You should probably see a doctor to be sure you’re okay.

  Even though he did not penetrate you, I and many other psychologists would define forced oral sex as rape, in your case date rape. Not all guys you date, of course, will do this.

  Date rape, by the way, refers to any time you are forced to have sex with someone you are with on a date or ended up with at a given time by choice. Acquaintance rape is when you are raped by someone you know only slightly but were with voluntarily. According to an extensive study by the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape in 2002, ninety percent of both date and acquaintance rape involves alcohol (see Chapter 10).

  Dear Dr. Patti,

  I am in college and one of my professors has made some comments to me and some of my friends that have made us kind of uncomfortable. He said we are pretty. He seems to stare at us. He told me not to worry about my grade because I am so attractive. Are we being sexually abused or sexually harassed? What’s the difference?

  Signed,

  College Blues

  Dear College Blues,

  Although sexual harassment is the generally accepted legal term it can still feel like abuse and violation. For example, if you are walking down the hallway in school or on the street and some man or boy calls out something like, “Hey babe, you look sexy! Nice ass! Let’s screw!” or “Can I have some!” it may not result in a physical assault, but it can certainly feel scary, especially if you are alone, and it can even bring up some of the same bad feelings that you�
��d have in an ongoing abusive relationship. I would suggest that you and your friends keep a record of these comments and then go to the dean and file a complaint. His comments could turn into abuse, and in any case he has no right to make you feel uncomfortable.

  There is a very fine line between sexual harassment and sexual abuse. You may read many different definitions of these two terms. Usually abuse involves some sort of physical violation, but it is more complicated than that. If I have a client who tells me that during her entire adolescence her father never touched her but he looked at her in a sexual way all the time, walked around naked in the house, left out pornographic materials, and called her a slut when she went out with her boyfriend, I would have to say she was sexually abused. Thus, abuse really does encompass those situations where sexual statements are so constant that they create a climate of abuse.

  Sexual abuse refers to being violated sexually. If the perpetrator never touches you but you feel totally violated by his words and looks and lack of boundaries, you may have the same feelings as a girl who has been violated through touch, so there’s not always that much difference in the end. Quite often, too, verbal sexual violation accompanies physical violation (see Chapter 11).

  Dear Dr. Patti,

  Is sexual abuse happening more now than in earlier times, or are we just hearing about it more, and is there any ethnic group that is more abused than another?

  Signed,

  Millennial

  Dear Millennial,

  It is only in the past few decades that people have been able to compile any reliable statistics on sexual abuse, because before that the whole subject was so taboo that very few people ever reported or talked about it. However, over the past ten years or so researchers have consistently found that one out of four girls in the United States will experience some form of sexual abuse—from invasive sexual touching to rape—by the time she is sixteen. Psychiatrist Alice Miller wrote extensively about the abuse of all children, particularly girls, going back to the nineteenth century, and recent work has suggested that Freud’s “seduction theory” was a cover-up for the rampant sexual abuse of young girls (see the Introduction). Unfortunately, we have no reason to think that sexual abuse hasn’t been happening for centuries.

  That is the whole point: sexual abuse is so often invisible, and you never know who is being abused. A girl or young women from any ethnic or racial group is at risk.

  Dear Dr. Patti,

  I feel trapped in a catch-22. Obviously, if it were not for my father I would not be here. But to be genetically connected to a monster like him—he raped me for most of my childhood—scares me so much. I am afraid that I will end up hurting children, too. I am very protective around kids, but the truth is I am afraid to babysit because I think I will do something weird. Is pedophilia genetic? I can’t even imagine ever hurting anyone, especially a child, but am I destined somehow to be like him?

  Signed,

  Trapped by My Genetics

  Dear Trapped by My Genetics,

  No, no, and no! You do not have any genetic predisposition for child molestation. I can assure you that there are almost no reported cases of female sexual-abuse survivors ever molesting anyone. You do not have any genes that will turn you into a pedophile. I would suggest that you take on some babysitting to prove to yourself that you will be fine with kids. I trust you. Please trust yourself. If you are very nervous about this, you can think about the way you are with children. If anything, I have found incest survivors to be particularly protective of small children.

  Dear Dr. Patti,

  I saw this movie once where a woman suddenly remembered her father molesting her when she was a girl, but, when she had her court case, they said she made it up. They called it “false memory syndrome.” Do girls make up sexual abuse? What exactly is false memory syndrome, and when did this all come about?

  Signed,

  Confused

  Dear Confused,

  False memory syndrome, as you suggest, refers to stories that are supposedly “made up” by suggestible patients under hypnosis. The “syndrome” was named in 1992 by clinicians at the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University in response to charges and lawsuits having to do with allegations of childhood sexual abuse ten, twenty, fifty years after it had happened. They claimed that memories can too easily get distorted over time, and that there simply wasn’t good evidence to support the stories of thousands of women who were coming forward with memories of past sexual abuse. In all cases of sexual abuse, evidence is difficult to gather, unless a woman or girl actually has a semen sample from inside her own vagina. Let me say this: Children don’t usually lie, and I have never met a girl or a woman who has made up a sexual-abuse experience. On the contrary, girls are hesitant to disclose sexual abuse. Statistics show that incest is the least-reported sex-abuse crime. Sometimes, if abuse happened before a baby knew how to talk, the memory will be stored in the form of feelings called precognition, and it can be trickier to reconstruct what happened, but that isn’t the same as a lie. (It is interesting to note that the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was created by two parents, Pamela and Peter Freyd, who were charged with sexual abuse by their own daughter Jennifer Freyd, who with the support of her grandparents confronted her father for sexually abusing her during her adolescence. Shortly after those accusations, the Freyds came out with the false memory syndrome theory.)

  Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and there have undoubtedly been some cases where a child or young woman was misled by an incompetent therapist into believing she was abused. But the evidence suggests that this is very, very rare. The vast majority of girls know the difference between reality and fantasy well.

  Dear Dr. Patti,

  When I went to see a therapist about my abuse, she wanted me to go under hypnosis. I was really frightened. She had me close my eyes and asked me to do what she told me. I couldn’t relax because my father always had me close my eyes before he would molest me. Then she wanted me to do EMDR [eye movement desensitization and reprogramming, another therapeutic technique], and that scared me, too. I have never been back to a therapist since. Is hypnosis really necessary for therapy?

  Signed,

  Eyes Wide Open

  Dear Eyes Wide Open,

  Some people claim that long-repressed memories are best recovered under hypnosis, and professionals do undergo very specific training to become hypnotherapists. However, it is not proven as a “cure” for repressed memories, and in the wrong hands it can certainly be misleading and harmful. For hypnosis to work, the person being hypnotized must trust the hypnotherapist enough to give up control to her, which makes it a complicated and controversial technique for sexual-abuse survivors.

  Proponents of hypnosis claim that it can open up and clarify memories that were otherwise vague. Opponents claim that thoughts and memories can be “planted” by suggestion. Many sex-abuse survivors have told me how frightening it is to undergo hypnosis and give over trust to someone else. In any case, hypnosis is generally not recommended for adolescents because their memories are usually pretty sharp.

  EMDR is another therapeutic technique that is based on the idea that hidden memories can be uncovered. It was developed in the late 1980s on the theory that because disturbing memories are stored in the brain, they can be “replaced” by new memories that are uncovered by thinking about the disturbing event while also focusing on something pleasing. In other words, the memories can be reconfigured. Some claim great results with EMDR, and it has the added benefit of working with your eyes open.

  Both hypnosis and EMDR are best used in conjunction with psychotherapy. In my experience, longer-term psychotherapy is the most curative, because you have time to establish trust with the therapist, which is so important when trying to heal from something as traumatic as sexual abuse.

  Dear Dr. Patti,

  A few days ago, I reported my father to the police for sexually abusing me. My whole family has now broken up. I hav
en’t eaten in two days and I cannot get out of bed. I am lonely, miserable, and on top of it I feel guilty. My mother says I am seriously depressed and is threatening to make me go to a psych hospital.

  Signed,

  Despondent

  Dear Despondent,

  What you did takes great courage, and the feelings you are having are not only normal but very, very healthy. You are finally allowing yourself to feel the feelings you had to repress to protect yourself at the time of the abuse so you could get through it. You are allowing your body to break down under the weight of what happened. Please tell your mother not to be afraid of these feelings, and encourage her to get counseling so she can understand what to expect during this time. In fact, in most States, in cases of incest the courts will mandate therapy for both the child and mother. The father may receive treatment as well as punishment often resulting in jail time.

  Depression lasts at least a few weeks and involves too much or too little sleep, loss of appetite or overeating, disinterest in your usual activities, and feelings of hopelessness. If you continue to sleep all the time and feel miserable, you may be headed toward a depression, and by all means I urge you to get some professional help (with a counselor or therapist or guidance counselor) to clarify and get a handle on your feelings. But, for now, you and your mother should understand that it’s healthy and normal to feel scared and depressed after reporting sexual abuse. You might try to find a support group for you and your mom. Also, show your mom this book. Try to reassure her that you are all right and you need her right now, not a psych hospital.