Faith Born of Seduction. Jennifer L Manlowe
(sexual violence).
Stigmatization refers to the negative connotations (badness, shame, guilt) that are communicated to the abused person by the perpetrator and often are subsequently incorporated into her self-image. His guilt becomes her shame. Many perpetrators disavow their guilt through the use of a variety of strategies including projection, rationalization—”You know you want it”—and denial. If that fails to expunge them of their guilt, they may attempt to justify the abuse on the basis that it is deserved by the victim.59 The survivor is often overwhelmed with shame and dread about her worth as a result of introjecting the perpetrator’s guilt.
Betrayal for abused children refers to the dynamics in which children discover that someone on whom they are dependent (the perpetrator) has harmed them or failed to protect them (the co-offender/silent witness). For adults, betrayal issues tend to relate to a sense of a “just world,” wherein victimization does not come to people who do not “deserve” it.60 Such child-victims often blame themselves and see their environment and even their bodies as having betrayed them. They find themselves feeling chronic vulnerability and a sense of meaninglessness, and often have a self-perception of inefficacy.61
Powerlessness is the feeling engendered when a child-victim’s will, desires, and sense of efficacy have been overcome or are subverted continually. Issues of powerlessness are particularly crucial for adolescents, who normally are struggling developmentally with issues of dependency and identity, and for children, who are vulnerable in any case. In incest situations, abusers often emphasize the victim’s helplessness as a control technique.62 If the victim resists her attacker/seducer often, the offender will escalate the offenses—becoming violent—to further humiliate the victim into submission. One survivor told me, “He was nice to me when I was very young, and when I reached adolescence and started refusing to play his games he got sadistic.”
These trauma dynamics are not limited to one part of a linear process. They operate before, during, and after the sexual contact. In a patriarchal culture, where parental power—especially paternal power—is defended at all costs, trauma dynamics surely apply as much to disclosure and intervention as to the abuse itself. Thus much of the stigmatization involved in the sexual abuse may occur after the experience itself, as the child encounters reaction among family, friends, and acquaintances.
These traumagenic dynamics also can be applied to the child’s life prior to the abuse. The four dynamics are ongoing processes, and the impact of the sexual abuse always needs to be understood in relation to the child’s life beforehand. For example, a child may have experienced a substantial amount of betrayal from other sources prior to the abuse, where the loyalty of significant others was continually in doubt. The betrayal of sexual abuse may be all the more serious because it is a compounding of a scenario that already existed. Traumagenic dynamics can be used to analyze sexual abuse as a process, rather than simply an event.63
As I stated earlier, it is a well-known fact that many mothers who do nothing to protect their daughters from abuse are particularly dependent on their partners, both financially and emotionally. Such women often have a history of being raped or molested themselves as children and as a result are particularly needy, insecure in their worth and femininity, and absorbed in their own unmet narcissistic needs.64 But no degree of maternal absence or neglect constitutes an excuse to tolerate paternal incest (unless one accepts the idea that fathers are entitled to female services from their entire families, no matter what the circumstances).65 It is precisely this attitude of male entitlement that characterizes the incestuous father and his apologists.66 Mental health professionals must scrutinize their gendered worldview and check their sexism at the door, if they are to be of any long-lasting help.
Multiple Personality Disorder
If the sexual trauma is chronic, a coping device called multiple personality disorder (MPD) may emerge. Not until the early 1980s did psychiatrists make the connection that patients with MPD almost invariably (95%) had been sexually or physically abused.67 Multiple personality disorder has undergone rapid analysis alongside an exponential growth in known cases. Women with MPD outnumber men by at least four to one.68
Fragmentation of the self into dissociated alters (inner characters created to carry overwhelming emotions) is the central feature of MPD. The array of personality fragments usually carries shattered aspects of the self, as in Haddock’s case. She has a compulsive cleaner named “Priscilla” and an extremely sensitive alter named “little Priscilla” who “carried my pain.” Often personality fragments include at least one “hateful” or “evil” alter, as well as one who is an impeccable performer along status quo lines.
While helping professionals should honor the survival techniques employed by each survivor—for they enabled her survival—they must be wary of crossing over into pathologizing or valorizing such symptoms (such as MPD or dissociation). These symptoms emerge as a result of the violence, and because these dissociative devices succeed, a terribly unjust distribution of the emotional burden is carried by the survivor.69 In Melinda’s words, “[A multiple personality disorder] is a survival mechanism and has nothing to do with your creativity and intelligence.” Multiple personalities cause the survivor rather than the society or family to bear the burden of her victimization.
Borderline Personality Disorder
Some MPD symptoms are also found among people who have been diagnosed as having borderline personality disorder. People with borderline personalities, unlike people with multiple personalities, are thought to lack the dissociative capacity to form fragmented alters, but they have similar difficulty developing an integrated identity.70 For the borderline patient, inner images of the self are split into extremes of good and bad. An unstable sense of self is one of the major diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder, and the “splitting” of inner representations of self and others is considered by some theorists to be the central underlying problem of the disorder.71
The common denominator of the two disorders is their origin in a history of childhood trauma. In the case of MPD the etiological role of severe childhood trauma is at this point firmly established. In a study of one hundred patients with the disorder, ninety-seven had histories of major childhood trauma, most commonly sexual abuse, physical abuse, or both.72 Extreme sadism and murderous violence were the rule rather than the exception in these harrowing histories. Almost half the patients had actually witnessed the violent death of someone close to them, as in the case of Haddock, who not only saw her parents mutilate animals but also saw her relatives, who were part of the same religious cult, take the life of a young black boy and a white teenage girl. In Haddock’s words,
My inner kids tell me they saw a little black boy hung—I have reason to believe that the cult members had ties to racial superiority. Another time, I woke up crying one day, I had a memory of a white girl—I was supposed to die but they took her instead. Her eyes were just so sad. And she was maybe fourteen when I was eight. I have memories of my cousin Davey bringing in a dagger—and his hands in my hands bringing a dagger down. I have a personality named Little Priscilla. In the ceremony they had done something to this horse—they killed it. But the head was sort of okay and the body was all bloody and icky and sticky. And it wasn’t dead yet, and Little Priscilla went up to it, and it looked at her with its eyes and she just petted its little head until it died. And the fact is, up until I uncovered a personality who carried my pain, I never felt any pain in my life.
Seeing a black child and a young white girl being murdered are early lessons writ large that have the intention of indoctrinating, through terror, young participants to respect and observe the gendered and racist hierarchy of their culture. Many cults, besides the Ku Klux Klan, are caricaturing wider cultural values. Melinda also saw animals being killed by her perpetrators and was forced to kill animals herself by the teenage boys who gang-raped her. Her offenders warned her: “If you talk, we’ll do the same to you.”
Another study found that 81 percent of borderline