Soul Rape

1

Disintegration of Life

Pretty little Amy, only nine years old, was playing near her inner-city home when a stranger raped her in full view of her young friends. Worse than the assault was her father's condemnation that placed full blame on her for letting it happen, and the onset of rejection. His words, "It's your own fault," formed an unceremonious branding of the child as a "less-than" that would be confirmed by periodic acts of sexual assaults against her as time went on. Each subsequent violation of her personhood was committed by people who were supposed to love her, not by strangers.

The stranger assaulted her body, shamed her beyond words, and made her feel like a piece of trash. But her own father is the one who raped her soul. He denied her the chance to form even an "adopted self". She was left without a clue as to her own existence. She ceased to exist.

By the time she entered her teen years, the original Amy was gone. There remained the form of a maturing female who knew no power of her own except for the ability to gain attention and meet survival needs through the sexual use of her body. So she sold it in order to exist. When she discovered that crack cocaine worked miraculously to lift her away from the anguish of nonexistence, she became a loyal slave to it.

She was only in her late teens when her body would no longer bring enough money for both living and crack. So she sold her body for crack only. She came down with pneumonia, and while in the hospital, she was diagnosed with AIDS. It was found that that she had carried the virus for a very long time. She estimated that she might have infected more than 150 men. Even while she was hospitalized, with oxygen at her nose and a feeding tube in her throat, and intravenous lines in her veins, she continued to accept the clients who came to her hospital room for their usual service. She lived almost two years after the first hospitalization, but because her lifestyle remained unchanged, she was dead by 24. Upon physically dying, she entered eternal life and came to know the unspeakable joy of real love for the first time. Only through death did she attain a life. Even though child abuse crosses all economic lines, poverty is the most prominent cause of child maltreatment. (Pelton, 2011)

Larry - Growing up Abused

Larry was neglected in foster homes from birth to age 2, when the real trouble began. His adoptive father hated him. He was yelled at, beaten, thrown out to agencies, brought back, cursed, ignored, insulted, and belittled until he was farmed out permanently to a boys' home in his early teens. His adoptive mother, living in terror that her husband might kill both of them, kept her mouth shut and even continued living with the man long after the boy had grown up.

Such is usually the case with mother figures living with a predator. She stands by and witnesses the step-by-step destruction of her child in order to hang on to her "man". Many mothers even become jealous of the attention the child receives, no matter how brutal. In other cases, they directly blame a sexually violated child by openly accusing the child of seduction.

The young man never told anyone but his therapist that when he was four, he used to wake up from nightmares about something hard and slimy under his blanket. When he awoke and felt the mattress, he wondered where the substance came from and what it was.

All of his life, he was tormented by his uncertain sexual identity. Even as this book was being written, he wondered whether he was bi-sexual or homosexual. But there is one thing he knew for sure: He was dying of full-blown AIDS, and in his mind, it was his rightful punishment for causing his father to hate him. Larry died before this book was published.

He had lived in a single room in a 10-story subsidized housing facility. Long abandoned by his family, he had no visitors, except for me, his support-counseling advisor. I recall him always sweating profusely with the air conditioner on high, full-blast, even in winter. I had to keep my coat on when I was in his apartment.

Most of all, I remember how he would beam each time he saw me, even though it was only one hour once a week. My job was only to provide company, but I treated him anyway, with the goal of freeing him from guilt. Most importantly, I did help him accept that he was a child of God with as much value as anyone and that his abuse was caused by the abuser, not by him, the victim.

Eventually, another therapist, a man, took my place and after about a month, made a pass at him. Larry was so upset by the incident that he called the agency providing the service and cancelled any future "therapy".

St. Paul called the love of money the root of all kinds of evil. But child abuse is an evil root that runs deeper, spreads farther, and holds a specific, predictable consequence: the loss of personhood and often of life itself. Always feeling despicable, the victim has neither hope nor any concept of eternal life. There is no possibility of a healthy relationship with God.

While AIDS is only one example, it is a recurring demonstration of abuse leading to a deadly disease. When a mind is set off course, the body follows.

In 2004, I presented a continuing education class on domestic violence for a medical center in Jacksonville, Florida. I began my remarks with this statement: "Domestic violence begins at age four." Abuse at the hands of a partner in early adulthood does not arise out of a vacuum merely by the poor choice of a mate. Rather, maltreatment from this stage on is very often the natural outcome of a type of "brainwashing" that begins early and receives reinforcement many times through the years.

It is during the early years that humans acquire their first ideas about who they are, and, unfortunately, they believe these falsehoods for the rest of their lives. Victims are initiated into a pattern of abuse, including self-abuse, not in adulthood, but in childhood. As a matter of fact, every one of us comes into adulthood with a second-hand opinion of who we are.

When a little child is called brilliant, stupid, beautiful, ugly, hopeless, helpless, good, bad, a blessing, or a curse, the child has no choice but to accept these assertions as "gospel". What other source of information does he have? He can absorb only the information available to him.

These messages are communicated just as well or better by what is unsaid. The glances, the pauses, the scowls, the smiles, the visual forces, all speak indelibly, although without sound. The child's self-definition derives from these impressions. They are permanent, like initials carved in the bark of a young tree that only enlarge as the tree grows.

You may have wondered by now why an example of male abuse has been included in our opening case histories, when little girls are abused, especially sexually, far more often. The reason is that the effects are the same. Female sexual abuse is slightly more prevalent. As best we know, one in every three little girls is sexually abused and about one in four boys. There is no way to know the actual prevalence because, of course, abuse occurs in secret. However, it is fairly accurate to say that perhaps 90 percent of women attending Alcoholics Anonymous have been sexually abused, and about 80 percent of the men have been physically abused, a large but unknown number sexually. Half the abused women are victims of incest. Present studies indicate about 40 million children abused per day world-wide.

When the child reaches adolescence, having mastered the lessons about who he is, he is driven to experiment. His concept of self may not work in the peer group, so various trial personalities and their accompanying behavior must be rotated until one works. Not to fit in means annihilation, not just rejection, and today the consequences can mean physical attacks as well. Clothes with the wrong label might literally be torn from his back.

In adulthood, the urgency to meet life on its own terms, that is, deal with the challenges of living, becomes more pressing, with countless choices to be made. One's identity, or a solid sense of who one is, determines the direction of these choices. But this idea of "self" is no more than a chance configuration. It is formed by combining the second-hand opinions received in childhood with the results of adolescent experimentation. Victims enter adult life with the greatest possible handicap-believing they know who they are and being wrong, or, alternatively, having no idea whatsoever. Either case requires dependence on someone else.

While child abuse might harshly be stated as "raping the soul", even children reared in fairly normal homes still suffer a "molestation" of their identity through the communication of false information about themselves. The messages can even be seemingly positive. I have met nearly-retarded people who were told all of their lives that they were brilliant, and the result was a life of endless frustration as they attempted to achieve goals that were impossible for them. And worse, they left unattended great possibilities in other realms that would have paid off with great enrichment.

But the tragedies I have seen over 28 years of practice mostly result from destructive, even malicious, assertions about the child's nature on the part of parents, teachers, siblings, and other influential...