Читать книгу Faith Born of Seduction - Jennifer L Manlowe - Страница 16

It’s hard to explain, but a certain kind of horror is beyond tears. Tears would be like worrying about watermarks on the furniture when the house is burning down.¹

Incest is generally thought of as a rare occurrence in society, yet, it is extraordinarily common. Within the patriarchal nuclear family, approximately 38 percent of girls and 10 percent of boys are sexually assaulted.² Every incest survivor with whom I have spoken has reported incest to be a horrendous and disorienting experience whether the incest was committed by a father, a brother, an uncle, a grandfather, a babysitter, an aunt, or a mother. The trauma is immense whether it was done in a manner that was seductive, tender, or brutal, or whether it happened a few times in a short period of time or it occurred over many years.

Incest robs children of their childhoods, of their sexual selves, of the basic ingredients necessary for relationships—trust, bodily integrity, boundaries, security, and self-esteem. One perspective on incest is that it “may result in different responses—sensuous and sexual, fear and terror, powerlessness and loss of self, loss of large blocks of time; but regardless of its form and the child’s response, incest is a devastating experience and leaves a devastating mark on its victim.”³

As a way of coping with sexual abuse, children develop behavioral skills to help them survive their childhoods. “[These] survival skills may include dissociation, hypervigilance, isolation, and/or using sex as a negotiating tool.”⁴ These techniques are necessary to help the child-victim survive a pathological adult-child relationship and as such are logical responses to chaotic childhoods.