Faith Born of Seduction. Jennifer L Manlowe
kind of look at it, you know?
“Could harm done to women make them more willing to harm themselves?” A Radiance magazine finding showed that 50 percent of anorexics in one clinic had been sexually abused. Plastic surgeon Elizabeth Morgan explored the relationship between incest and the desire for plastic surgery after many of her patients admitted they had been victims of child sexual abuse: “I came to understand that many of them wanted to erase the memory of the children they looked like when they were abused.”90
There are many reasons a woman who has been abused might injure herself. Janine used self-injury to get her mother’s attention. Like Haddock she wanted to break out of the denial.
One time I sprained my wrist doing gymnastics and when I reported the injury to my mom, she said, “This is the fourth time this month that we’ve had to run to the doctor for some minor sprain or another. If we go to the doctor’s this time and he doesn’t find anything wrong I’m going to be furious with you!” While I waited in the car for my mom to take me to the doctor’s, I lifted my sprained [gestures with arm] wrist and swung it down hard against the dashboard with all my might. The doctor claimed it was just a hairline fracture but I remember feeling relief knowing that there was visible evidence to prove to my mom that I was in fact injured.
Survivors who self-mutilate consistently describe a profound dissociative state preceding the act. Depersonalization, derealization, and anesthesia are accompanied by a feeling of unbearable agitation and a compulsion to attack the body. The initial injuries often produce no pain at all. The mutilation continues until it produces a powerful feeling of calm and relief; physical pain is much preferable to the emotional pain that it replaces.91 Many do it to prove that they in fact have been hurt. As Haddock says, “I look at that scar and say, ‘Yes, it really happened.’” In all four cases cited above, the survivor needed to show me (the interviewer) the reality of her emotionally injured self by showing me where she had physically undergone injury.
Self-injury is also frequently mistaken for a suicidal gesture. Though many (38 percent) survivors of childhood abuse do indeed attempt suicide,92 there is a clear distinction between repetitive self-injury and suicide attempts. One theory purports that “self injury is intended not to kill but rather to relieve unbearable emotional pain, and many survivors regard it, paradoxically, as a form of self-preservation.”93 Self-injury is perhaps the most dramatic of the auto-destructive soothing mechanisms, but it is only one among many.
Female survivors, socially engendered to be docile, are far more likely to be victimized or to harm themselves than to victimize other people. There are more female perpetrators, however, than are reported.94 Yet it is surprising that survivors do not become perpetrators of abuse more often. Perhaps because of their cultural devaluation and deep feelings of self-loathing, due to internalizing the perpetrator’s perspective, female survivors, unlike males, seem most likely to direct their aggression at themselves. While suicide attempts and self-mutilation are strongly correlated with childhood abuse, homicidality is not.95
Re-offended Later in Life
Many child-victims cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in an environment of seductive and sometimes violent control is not well suited to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems regarding bodily boundaries, basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. Living in a patriarchal and offending culture (whether she lives alone or not) means there is no place outside of her fear; there are no gender-neutral domains or violence-free spaces.96 For all these reasons, the adult survivor is at great risk of repeated victimization in adult life.
“Were you ever abused later in life?”
Haddock told me:
When I was about twenty-three a guy exposed himself to me. I was waiting for the bus to go back to school; I had been in a job interview. When I was twenty-six some guys that my mom said were our cousins took me and my sister to the beach. One of the guys pinned me down and I was knocked unconscious—I don’t—I remember kind of coming to—I—I was having my period, I had a Tampax in there. I couldn’t get that tampon out for three days. And J apologized to him, I said, “Jerry, I’m not gonna sleep with you tonight. My sister needs me.”
When Haddock went into her sister’s room to tell her that she had been raped, her sister responded, “You deserved it.” Blaming the victim of a sex crime is certainly common, but when one experiences such blame from a family member the pain and alienation it produces goes even deeper.
Cherise told me of the time she met a street artist who, in her words, “was absolutely gorgeous.” She said he was especially sweet to her and seemed to be a very sensitive man. She later found out that he was a rapist.
He was a pathological liar. After he raped me he said, “Well, what are you gonna do? I mean, who’s gonna believe you—you should be glad to even have someone like me.” On one level I thought he was right. And then on the other level—this was—this is rape, you know, and so I just lived in this confused state, and this is where the whole body images come, because, I, you know, was obese at the time. So I didn’t have a sense of ownership of my body, I was like, “Well maybe he’s right; I mean how could I ever expect to get a gorgeous man like this?” Never mind that this man refused to be seen with me in public.
Note how Cherise felt a double bind: “On one level he was right” (she was obese and so felt worthy of abuse) and on the other, “this was rape.” Cherise reveals a belief held by almost every woman I interviewed, and that is “if I am thin I’m invulnerable.” Thinness seems to be a magical defense against violation; it can even give one the illusion that she is “undeserving” of rape.
Janine was date-raped by a man who was a member of an Adult Children of Alcoholics Anonymous group. She reported feeling deeply betrayed by him: “I cared about him and he violated my trust. The day after the rape, I had my first images of my dad sadistically torturing me. I cried as I wrote my ex-friend that I couldn’t see him any more because no one was ever going to hurt me again the way my dad hurt me. I got into a therapy group for incest survivors because of all this.”
When Margery was in graduate school she had a football player sneak up on her in the dark and attempt to rape her. She says, “I screamed so loud that I fell backward and he ran like hell.” Five years later Margery was raped by a minister she was dating. She said, “One day he got so angry at me that he pushed me down and anally raped me. That’s when all of my history of abuse with my grandfather surfaced. I was a wreck.” A common theme that emerged among several of the survivors interviewed was to have a sexual crime in adulthood trigger flashbacks of their sexually abusive childhoods.
Renita illustrates how disconnected she feels to her sexuality and how such a disconnection leaves her open to being used as an object—a common result of childhood sexual abuse. “When Don and I had sex I kind of felt like he used my body for his pleasure—I would just space out while he was trying to get off on me. I didn’t even know this was unusual until I told my therapist. And to say it out loud, now, is so scary [whisper].” The risk of rape, sexual harassment, or battering, though high for all women, is approximately doubled for survivors of childhood sexual abuse.97 In Diana Russell’s study of women who had been incestuously abused in childhood, two-thirds were subsequently raped.98
Classic psychoanalytic theory has commonly portrayed a woman’s repeated victimizations as clear signs of her inherent masochism. The earlier belief was that these women not only enjoyed physical pain but were addicted to repeated abuse.”99 In reality, repeated abuse is not actively sought but is passively experienced as a dreaded but unavoidable fate, accepted as the inevitable price of a relationship. As a result of revictimization in adult life, many survivors experience even greater physical and emotional trauma, lower self-esteem, and a heightened risk of HIV and other infections due to unprotected sex.
Many survivors have extreme deficiencies in self-protection and self-valuation and as such