In her acceptance speech for her Best Supporting Actress award at the Golden Globes last week, Mo’Nique spoke to victims of childhood sexual abuse, saying “it’s now time to tell.” I support Mo’Nique and think acknowledging childhood sexual abuse is an important, positive thing. But there needs to be a public education campaign aimed at victims’ loved ones.
So many of society’s messages regarding abuse are aimed at the victims: This is how you should act. This is what you should do. And I am not directing this complaint at Mo’Nique specifically. I don’t think it’s fair to put yet another expectation on abuse victims when the content of their confessions are so often swept under the rug, denied, or ignored. People’s reactions to revelations of molestation can cause victims more pain and suffering than the initial abuse.
I am not saying, “Don’t tell;” I don’t believe that. I think “Tell” is incomplete. In a rape culture, “telling” often leads to revictimization. It leads to parents siding with the family friend who raped you. It leads to questions about what you could have done to invite that sort of touching. It leads to commands to just get over it already. It leads to the same bullshit adult rape victims deal with when they report their attacks.
No, terrible things are not inevitable. One could argue that telling is necessarily cathartic and healing regardless of the listener’s reaction. Victims can use their discretion if they expect certain people to react poorly, and they can tell as much or as little as they want. Telling a therapist can be especially helpful. But overall, the cracks are with the adults. It’s the adults who need to be taught how to handle it when loved ones “come out,” so to speak. Kids need to hear, “Tell,” but adults need to hear, “Listen.”
I absolutely agree, and I think we should expand the campaign to include physical/emotional abuse and neglect. I was physically and emotionally abused as a kid, and actually did tell some adults. Years later their daughter was telling them a story about something she observed at my house to which they responded – “Wow, we always thought veggiewood was making that stuff up.” My parents, my mother in particular, presents as especially charming, so no one would believe the stories (my sister had the same problem). People need to understand that parents who abuse their children can appear, gasp, shockingly normal to the rest of the world.
I think there’s the beginning of a cultural shift when it comes to people talking openly about childhood sexual abuse, but we have a long way to go.
I give people like Mo’Nique, Tyler Perry, Gabriel Byrne, etc. a lot of credit for being very open about the fact they were abused, because I think it’s enormously helpful to the people who have been suffering in silence. I bet the phone lines at RAINN and other sexual abuse hotlines lit up thanks to Mo’Nique.
If you watch shows like “Intervention” or “Celebrity Rehab”, and one of the things that’s most startling about them is how about 95% of the people featured have absolutely horrifying stories of childhood abuse. And yet all the time you hear people dismiss their revelations as “oh, well, she’s crazy” or “oh, well, he’s a cokehead.” That kind of dismissal just enrages me, because many of those people are crazy or addicted largely BECAUSE of the abuse they suffered.
I hope that those shows and celebrities being vocal will help get it through people’s heads that abuse affects SO MANY people, and we as a society need to quit victim-blaming and treat abuse with the seriousness it deserves.
Great post, SMC. Sadly spot on. It’s something I forget some times, probably because I’ve been lucky enough to avoid really horrible incidents myself.
Urging people (often girls and women) to “tell” could be interpreted as the counterpart to all the “how to prevent rape” crap that is thrown at us. The responsibility is put back on those most likely to be victimized.
@PhDork: I gotta say, though, and I said this to SarahMC, you really can’t begin to heal from sexual abuse unless you talk about it, even if the only person you tell is a therapist or a trusted friend. Silence does not heal.
Blaming/judging women for not telling is bad. But encouraging women to tell so that they can heal and get help is only a good thing, IMO. They don’t have to tell their families, they don’t have to tell the police, but the only way to work through the trauma is to talk about it.
I hear that, Becky. I think dragging dark things out into light and air is a great idea, but that should be for the benefit of the victimized. Insisting on it makes it seem like the solution to abuse (of whatever source) is just “hey, survivors, speak up!, and if you don’t, well, you’re culpable for the fact that it continues,” even if it doesn’t happen to you. It’s a nasty burden on those who are already carrying around a giant bag of unwanted crap.
Beautifully put SMC. Yes, abuse needs to be out in the open and talked about but we need to implore people to LISTEN more than we need to implore victims to TELL. The sad fact is, often times even when victims tell, they’re ignored or worst.
thank you for writing this. i wish my parents could read it and actually assimilate that it is speaking almost directly to them. i am an incest survivor, and my parents have pretty much run the gamut of inappropriate and devastating responses.
and phdork, i really appreciate your response. the need is to shift the culture, and the responses to disclosure, not to further burden victims with another responsibility.
I am also an incest survivor, violated at age 3 by my paternal ‘grandfather’ the Bible-thumping “Christian” one of whose fave bible verses of course was “Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not.” He also molested boys; the best family info I had from an elderly relative before she died indicates that he also molested my Dad and my Uncle when they were little. My parents believed my report of the violation; they confronted him; but he’d lent them money for their wedding and a house downpayment – he held that debt over their heads. There were no legal recourses then about the incest.
He took forever to die; at age 99 he tried to molest two little boys in his neighborhood and thank goodness did not succeed; they reported him to their parents who took immediate action. How many kids’ lives in and out of our family were wounded by this serial predator?
There was a great deal of family fractionalizing about the incest abuse. I agree: families need lots of help. Just having Oprah specials, soap operas and the occasional late-night crime movie theme isn’t enough to help families deal with this profound and potentially mortal wound to the family’s Heart. But as long as dropping bombs and building stealth bombers is the federal government’s own favorite kind of predatory serial crime, we will NOT have the funds required.
How I wish that there were campaigns promoting listening in the way you write about. My mom never once broached the subject of my molestation (by a cousin) with me despite the fact that she walked in on it. The truth is that so many people don’t know what abuse victims need, in many cases a rebuilding of the ability to trust. If there is a concerted societal effort to listen and support the people Mo’Nique reached out to, then hopefully it will help survivors feel that the telling of their stories will not be in vain.
That’s such an awesome thing to do. I didn’t really know who she was before I read this, and then I found out that not only is she completely bad ass by talking about sexual abuse, she also has hairy legs, which puts her waaaaay up on the list of the most awesome people of all time.