I have heard this claim repeated over and over again in cases of sexual abuse of children, especially in cases where stepfathers are abusing stepdaughters in the same house as the mother.
I’m asking dopers opinions about this because as the father of two kids I really have a hard time grasping the validity of a claim like this. I just have a hard time believing that it’s all that hard to keep track of what’s going on in your own house. Are people really this clueless and/or abusers this stealthy and intimidating, or is there usually some “look the other way” element involved in these cases? Women are typically an order of magnitude more attuned and sensitive to what is going on in their household environment than men are. Why this huge blind spot?
Denial is indeed powerful. Sometimes painful things are so hard to deal with, you create others scenarios to deal with it.
Imagine this: You’re a woman. You have children from previous relationships/marriages. You marry a man with a good job who is able to give you a nice, stable lifestyle – something you may not have had hope for if you were on your own. Or, at the very least, he saves you from the stigma of being a single mother.
So you ignore the signs when this man begins molesting your children. You tell yourself that your little daughter is just “shy” when she doesn’t want your husband to put her to bed, and that she’s just “restless” when your husband spends far too long in her room. When she behaves in ways that are far too overtly sexual for a child, you tell yourself that she is just “fast.”
You keep hoping that you’re not seeing what you think you’re seeing. You suggest to yourself that if anything was happening, your child would tell you, right? It’s hard enough to believe/accept that that your husband is sexually abusing your child, much less that he might have threatened your child into silence.
But most of all, you tell yourself that if anything is going on, it’s no big deal because you all have a nice house, your husband makes a nice living and the kids have a good life and will be fine, because that’s all that matters, right? So you hope that all the outside world can see is that you all are one, big happy family. You’ll do anything to preserve that image, for yourself as well as anyone else.
Then the children grow up and begin speaking out. You’re afraid of what this may do to your husband’s and family’s reputation. Besides, you’ve spent years believing that nothing untoward happened, or that if it did, no harm was done. So, why are your kids trying to ruin everything? Why are they trying to embarrass the family? So, you tell everyone that the children are lying, and become estranged from them, and they from you.
It happens all the time. Happened in my family. And now, 40-something years later, it has created terrible rifts, anger and sadness that’s hard to eliminate. But people are finally healing, which is wonderful.
BTW, I forgot to thank the OP for the question. The fact is, a lot of abuse of all kinds goes unchecked because people don’t ask “What’s going on?” The best prevention, and cure, for this stuff is keeping your eyes, mind and heart open. Thanks for being curious.
My niece was molested by her uncle. She told her cousin, asking the cousin not to tell anyone. My other niece, the cousin, told her mom, who told the molested niece’s mom. They went to the police, who seemed astounded that there would be charges pressed. My b-i-l’s sister, the wife of the molester, gave my sister and her husband all kinds of hell, telling them my niece was a liar, they were being persecuted, etc. As the investigation proceeded, it turns out the man had been molesting his own daughters, neighborhood kids and that his step-daughter had been kicked out of the house by her mother when she told her mom the guy was molesting her. Kicked out when she was 16. It was the courage of one child that stopped over a decade of abuse by this man.
Dear God do I wish this were the Pit … because I have a true story here. Starts around … 1918. For our purposes, ends in the mid 20s (though, outside of our own purposes, for all I know it could still be going on. But that’s a different matter, and if you want/need to know, my email’s a click away).
Hokay. Husband goes off to war (WWI, America, etc). Gets killed. Wife has to make ends meet somehow, so she takes in a boarder.
First child had been born in 1909 (my grandfather, and this fact comes into play later:mad: ). Second I think in 1911, maybe? When the boarder came, my grandfather was nine or so, and there were at least two other small children in the house (one of whom joined a convent rather than let this piece of filth do anything more to her).
It is beyond the ability of my being to understand either how a person could do what this creature did to those children (children. CHILDREN) or how their mother could allow it to continue. I am 99% sure she knew and, given how deeply she cared for her husband and children AND how very intelligent she was (not just booksmart, though she had several books published), it just … :mad: I cannot fathom it.
Oh, but it gets much more interesting (if that word is even applicable here). Enter my great-grandmother … father’s mother’s mother. Let’s forget, for the moment, her attempted murder of her own child. She was far worse to her grandchildren (her only daughter’s ten children) than to her daughter. I will never know all the details, but the fertility of two of my aunts was, shall we say, compromised in serious ways by this woman. Knitting needles. Scissors. Fingernails. And that’s just the girls. At least two of the sons and at least one of the daughters continued the cycle with not only their siblings but their children.
And in this case I am as sure that my grandmother knew as I am that I am typing this post.
My grandfather, of course, was not missing from this equation. Continuing the cycle started by the boarder (his name not being worthy of much of anything, let alone falling into this thread), he molested all ten of his legitimate children (while engaged to my grandmother, who at the time was living in France, where she was born and where she lived up until 1935 [and that’s another nice long story I’ll tell sometime], he had an affair with one of the maids. In this case he had some sense of right and wrong, and paid child support. This was substantially before child support was something that was usually paid. Started in the 30s and kept going into the late 40s and possibly 50s, if I recall correctly. One of the more decent things he ever did, but then he didn’t have many of them).
Again, how a creature could exist who had the intestinal fortitude to molest his own children is beyond my understanding. And again, I know my grandmother knew. She was, as I’ve said several times on this board, and in any number of other places (openness about these events is my way of preventing them from happening to anyone. ever. again), an enabler. She full well knew.
The oldest son would go on to teach classes in the school my grandparents founded. He had to be dismissed twice because parents of students would otherwise have brought suit against the school. And according to same grandmother, “one of those girls was positively nasty” (meaning not very nice).
Amazing … simply amazing how one can so fully ignore this sort of thing in favor of a (nonexistent) positive “reality”.
So there you have it. Take an incredibly sick individual and under the right circumstances the mother will … well, I don’t know that she took part, but you know what?
It would not surprise me one fucking bit. Not one.
My paternal grandfather died in 1995 (don’t be sorry. I know I’m sure as hell not. And if I go to Heaven I know one person who will. not. be. there.). His wife went to her grave lying about him. Right and left. She had the chance to help her children get through the shit they’d been dealt.
And she kept on enabling instead.
My father started going into therapy back in the late-ish 90s for (seemingly) wholly unrelated things … panic attacks, flashbacks he couldn’t understand. For years my godmother (second-youngest child) had been saying that they had done unspeakable things not only to her but to everyone else. She had DID (then known as MPD). Nobody believed her. Repressed memories you wouldn’t even be able to believe. And after my grandfather died, things started coming back to them (they were safe:) He could not hurt them ever again:)). But few of them knew what it was all about.
One day my father and I were in the car … I think I was 18. I know I was in college. I was driving him somewhere and before we started, he looked at me and slowly said:
“I think I was molested by my father when I was young.”
Evidently my sisters had not really wanted to know this. Why? I dunno. Maybe I just have a different way of dealing with things. Anyway, it slowly came out that my father and every one of his siblings had been molested by, at the very least, two people (oldest legit child didn’t have any older siblings to rape him). In some cases … five. Maybe more, I don’t know. Five more than should ever happen. I wouldn’t wish what happened to them to anyone regardless of how otherwise ill I feel of them. Not even my grandfather.
Today I know that the cycle has mostly ended. My father could never have done anything like that to me. He could barely even spank me when I was bad. He just impressed upon me that he wanted me to be good, and that started to work better than physical violence ever really could (violence makes you, or rather me, fear. Fear only lasts while the person is around. Respect is forever). I do not know for a fact that it has ended everywhere, but I do not know of a way to find out without making any situation much worse (as others who were victim to this and similar things have said, both here and in other places, outside intervention often makes things only worse). I do know that in … seven cases, the cycle has ended.
I hope that in the other three it has.
There is an impossibly large amount of background information I’ve skipped. Some of it is because I just don’t know enough to convey it textually. Some of it isn’t essential enough to this OP to tell.
And some of it is not mine to tell.
So, finally, to answer your question empirically (or inasmuch as I really can): it happens. It takes some mighty unfortunate circumstances, oh yes. But humans (genetically. Not morally, but genetically) are capable of evils some of which the world as a whole may never know.
:mad:
Again, if anyone has questions or wants to know more, my email is in my profile.
In my case, my father had lost his job, my younger sister had been diagnosed as being autistic, and money was very tight.
Somehow I didn’t think it was a good idea to bring up the fact my cousin’s boyfriend was molesting me. Years later, when I did tell my mother, she said she knew something was wrong but at the time just couldn’t handle another problem in her life. She figured I would tell her if “it was serious”. And I would have felt guilty, even as a twelve year old, on burdening her further.
My mother was an alcoholic and my stepfather was very controlling. They fought constantly. My mom drank more to drown the pain, I guess. Then he started molesting my sister and I when we were 11 and 12. My sister never let him near her after that and got several beatings. It was a weekly routine, her getting beaten much like me being molested. I think her really got off on the time he molested me while my mom was passed out on the bed next to us. (She had tried to leave him several times before and never went through with it.) When I told him to leave me the expletive deleted alone, about, oh, 3 years later, he decreed my sister and I were not worthy of his support and told our mom we were not allowed to eat any food in the house. My mom hid food beneath our dresser drawers so we could eat before he got home from work. When I finally told someone, I did so because she was a friend of my stepfather and she had a young daughter. (He had invited them to live in their RV on the side of our driveway.) My mom left him after she found out, but she was still pretty much in denial about it. The night she found out, she got drunk, drove me to friend’s house and asked them to watch me for the night.
That’s the boiled down story of why I was terrified to have children of my own. iampunha, give your dad a hug from me please.
It’s a strange thing, almost … my siblings and I, before our paternal grandfather died, spent loads of time with my father’s parents … I spent many nights there. Occasionally I wonder, given how pre-disposed I am to repressing bad memories, if there’s anything he did that I never told anyone about.
I’m fairly confident that the reason he wasn’t afraid to have kids is because he, too, had repressed most of what happened. It only started coming out, really, after both of his parents died.
And by then he was free of them and so were his children.
I will never know for sure if he ever touched me. I don’t know that he ever got better.
Another victim of a stepfather here. My mother was the absolute queenbitch of denial. Even after my sister got pregnant by the jerk and gave birth, my mother minimized everything: Well, they’re not REALLY related. He didn’t REALLY hurt you. You probably would have done it with someone else anyway. You probably wanted it anyway.
Turned out this minister had other victims, including unwed teenaged mothers he was “counselling” (after knocking them up).
The whole thing came to light when one girl’s family had the courage to report him.
Just wanted to corroborate what iampunha said. Every word of it, so far as I can tell, is true. In fact, he seems to know some things that I don’t know yet.
And I loved my in-laws. When I started to find out about this stuff, I didn’t know what to do. Surely not? But yes . . . but they’re such lovely people! Surely not . . . but yes. Artistic, musical, literary, religious people. Pillars of the community. Helped to bring a public library to the community. Helped to found a church. Founded a school – gee, I wonder why.
It’s Movie of the Week stuff. People who know them would never have suspected. They knew that my in-laws were controlling and didn’t like their kids to get married or leave home, but they had no clue at all that heinous crimes were taking place.
We strongly suspect that a few of the kids have chosen to continue the loathesome abusive cycle. I want to emphasize here that it is their choice. Nobody ever has to hurt children.
Sucks to know I am not alone in being molested. My father molested me from as far back as I can remember until the day I got the keys to my own apartment.
When I was really young he told me that he had to do this to cure his headaches. When I was a little older he made me think I was haunted by ghosts and would die if I didn’t perform these acts on him. He tried to hypnotize me so I would be more complacent and also gave me muscle relaxors and alcohol to stop me from fighting. Brute force was his most common tool.
My mother knew and did nothing because she did not want the stigma of both divorce and molestation. Thanks mom! She even walked in on him naked on top of me and she threw a hissy fit but things were back to “normal” in a week. She explained to me once that if she’d have left him we would have had to live in gasp an apartment! Quell horreur! The house we lived in was a pig sty anyway that the board of health would have condemned had they ever been inside. Besides, she reasoned, if it was really bad I would have become a delinquent.
I remember being 11 or so and telling my father I would go to the police. He laid it all out for me: Who are they gonna believe? A bratty kid that I will explain is just lying because she was made to do chores or me… President of the PTA, Big Brother, founder of the teen center at the school blah blah blah. that logic worked on me then… if it hadnt he’d have beaten it into me anyway.
He’s been out of my life for some time now but my mother and my brother are still in denial. My mother can’t bring herself to even speak of the abuse, she just looks at me stricken like when I try and talk of it.
I have a baby girl of my own now with a wonderful husband who has helped me through the lovely after effects this kind of stuff leaves. I know how scared and awful I felt for so many years that I will do everything in my power to make sure no one ever makes my child feel that way!
There is no excuse for this stuff! Ignorance is never bliss for the children who are hurt.
Thanks for letting me vent on a topic very important to me!
I wasn’t sexually abused, but I was physically abused (by classmates at a private school). I had a hell of a time trying to convince my mother that this was really going on. She laughed it off by telling me that the boys involved had a crush on me and this was how they showed it. In fact, she made it harder, because she refused to listen and bought the school’s line.
It didn’t help that the administration of the school painted me as the instigator, and in need of some kind of psychological help. The climax to this was the day two or three much older boys locked me in a broom closet and beat me to the point where I was black-and-blue. The abuse finally stopped when I brought razor blades to school to defend myself. The school insisted that I see a psychiatrist, which I did. The shrink listened to my side of the story, told my parents and the school there was nothing wrong with me, and I was back in public school the next day.
I think that the reason the school did not act in the face of such obvious bullying was simply the profit motive. Simply put, it’s much easier to bear the loss of one child than it is to lose two or more. My mother bought the school’s line that I was instigating the bullying, and that I needed counseling. And because I was looked at as “the troublemaker”, I was blamed for a lot more than just the bullying.
My point is that parents aren’t always the most astute people on earth. They’re people with feelings, attitudes and points of view of their own. I think that had my mother been less inclined to believe the school and more likely to question what I was trying to tell her, I’d’ve been spared a lot of pain. But because she didn’t, I was in the middle of Hell on Earth.
