Faith Born of Seduction. Jennifer L Manlowe
instead.” Other mothers of the survivors interviewed were unable to recognize their role in silencing the child who was suffering incest. Note the case of Janine:
When I was four, I was sexually molested, digitally, by my babysitter (a sixteen-year-old male neighbor) and that was my first experience, as far as I can remember. I was also subsequently mauled by my uncle and my dad in sexual ways. My dad was the most offensive. He always made comments and innuendos about my sexual appeal to him; even when I was ten years old he would ask me to try on clothes and string bikinis and model them for him. At other times he would have me perform sexy dance routines. I don’t really have memories of not feeling like a sexual object. Of course, my mother was numb to it.
Estrangement between mother and daughter leaves the daughter emotionally vulnerable and without adequate support and protection.
Broken Trust—Felt Powerlessness
Who could abuse a child? A sexual offender is someone in a position of power or authority who exploits that power by manipulating, by seducing, and by sexually invading one less powerful than him or herself. This violating of boundaries and trust can wreak havoc on a child’s perception of herself and her world. When a child is given the message that the older people who know her will love her and protect her, and then instead an older, trusted member of her family abuses her and no adult validates the reality of this assault, the child’s sense of reality becomes distorted. Such a distortion is narcissistically and socially wounding. A feeling of powerlessness ensues because no one will hear or protect her from the ongoing abuse. The child who has been sexually abused is harmed further if she tells someone and is not believed. She is doubly wounded if she is encouraged to trust in God for her safety. (See more about the devastating role of paternalistic theology in chapters 5 and 6.)
The child who is being sexually assaulted is trapped in a private, impossibly confusing world that gives no validation to the crime of the incest experience. The incestuous intruder into the child’s private world is “like a monster that inhabits her closet: He threatens her only when she is alone, and she must find her own ways of coping with his overpowering presence.”44
“Regarding your abuse, any idea whether anyone else knew about it?”
Cherise told me that the only people who knew about her father’s abusiveness have died: “My mother committed suicide when I was seven years old; she was twenty-eight.” After the successful suicide attempt by Cherise’s mother, her father told her, “Your momma was crazy, and she jumped into Lake Erie, and she’s dead. And we’ll never ever speak about her again.” Cherise told me that his sexual and physical abuse of her began very quickly after her mother’s suicide: “Every day he began with degradation rituals.” At these times her father would molest, beat, and rape Cherise and then degrade her with a litany of abusive remarks about her body size. Cherise remembers how her grandmother would threaten her father, and felt especially protected from her father when her grandmother was around. She told me she would never forget the day her grandmother died: “But I remember when I was ten, finding out from my father that my grandmother had a heart attack. And—and it was like the gates of hell had opened. I knew it was—this is it, I’m dead—I knew I was dead ... it was like the one person that was protecting me was gone.” Cherise told me her childhood was full of loss, “first my mother, then my grandmother, and to be left alone with my father—my father was psychotic.” Cherise later found out from her cousins that her mother was her father’s third wife, and that all had committed suicide. She added to her list of loss when she said, “My brother also jumped off a bridge into the same lake my mother did. I’m convinced he took his life as a result of residual effects of years of abuse, absolute years of abuse.”
Natalie recalls her fathers’s abuse through “body memories.” She claims, “I know that I was sexually molested by my dad as a child. I don’t have cognitive memories of it but I’ve had a lot of body memories of it. I tend to think that my mom was kind of turning her back on it.” Janine remembers a time when her nine-year-old brother and his friends pulled down her pants in a kind of “we’ll-show-you-ours-if-you-show-us-yours” game. She says,
I remember running home crying like I was going to go to hell for sure, and I remember telling my mom that this happened, and my mom said, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell your father.” And, it was interesting that it was assumed that J really was bad and, like a good Catholic, I got the message that I was sinful. She gave me the feeling that I am bad and that she’ll keep it our little secret. Anything that sexually happened to me or was wrong would have been blamed on me. I got that message very early. I was five years old.
Janine told me that she felt there was no point in telling anyone about being abused; she was sure she’d be blamed: “I thought that the physical punishment would be much worse than carrying around all that shame.”
In a patriarchal culture, more often than not, a heterosexual woman’s first loyalty is to her male partner, on whom she is financially and emotionally dependent, regardless of his behavior. She sees no other choice. One theory is that maternal collusion in incest, when it occurs, is a measure of maternal powerlessness.45
Melinda believed her mother knew about the sexual abuse of her by her father and brother and his friends, though she hesitates to blame her mother: “She never said anything to me directly about it. And I—and I don’t remember trying to tell her about the rapes. I—I don’t remember. Though it seemed to me that I was screaming it in my body and in my mind, but I don’t remember words.”
Stephanie spoke of frequently being dropped off with her maternal grandparents for weekend visits. It was during her stay there that she and her siblings were molested by their grandfather. She remembers when her parents would come back to pick them up on Sunday nights: “When they arrived, I wouldn’t look at them, and I wouldn’t go to them. I was in a shell for a long time. But they don’t make any connection with sexual abuse about that, they think it’s a kind of cute little story.” Stephanie recalls that when she had to stay with her grandparents she felt “horrified.” In her words, “I mean I was in absolute terror, just absolute, heart-stopping terror.” Stephanie later told me she felt her perpetrating grandfather had the power to kill her: “I think I might have been smothered a little bit by him so that I wouldn’t talk or scream or whatever.” She told me she felt he had the power to taint, even ruin her: “He was decimating me as well.” It is clear to me that Stephanie has taken in her offender’s shame and gives religious meaning to such shame by calling it an “evil force.” In her words, “I felt that this man planted this evil root and that this evil root took hold inside of me because of what was happening. As I child I thought he was a monster.”
In situations of terror, people spontaneously seek their first source of comfort and protection. “Wounded soldiers and raped women cry for their mothers or for God.”46 When this cry is not answered, the sense of basic trust is shattered. One theory on trauma and abandonment holds that “traumatized people feel utterly abandoned, utterly alone, cast out of the human and divine systems of care and protection that sustain life. Thereafter, a sense of alienation, of disconnection, pervades every relationship, from the most intimate familial bonds to the most abstract affiliations of community and religion.”47
Most of the survivors interviewed knew without question and learned through devastatingly painful experiences that nobody would give serious credence to their fears. A mother may have been the most incredulous and punishing after being told, not because she was indifferent to the child but because she has been culturally constructed (and thus psychologically compelled) to protect her trust in the basic decency of her male partner and the fundamental security of adult society. Psychiatrist Roland Summit claims, “Since an adult assumes that other decent adults don’t commit incest, and since it is generally believed that children wishfully imagine incestuous experiences or fabricate groundless accusations of sexual assault, it is predictable that most women will reject any hint of incest given by their children.”48 Only an unusually secure and perceptive woman can reward her child for sharing