Do those who are apologising for acts of child abuse have a clue what they are apologising for? It is not something that happened back then. It is an ongoing life experience for the victims, writes Liz Smith, who was abused as a child.
With all the media coverage of child abuse scandals, I listen to what sometimes sound like hollow apologies, and to people talking about "incalculable damage to victims" etc. But I am left wondering does anybody, apart from those who have been actually abused, really know what they are talking about?
My next birthday will be my 50th. I was severely sexually abused when I was three and four years of age. Forty-five years later, I am still dealing with it. While I refuse to define myself by my abuse, it is a huge part of me, has had a monstrous effect on my life and, regardless of how determined I am to do otherwise, it sometimes feels as if it is all that I am.
To those who do not know me very well, and I include here my family, I probably appear to be a very normal person experiencing the usual ups and downs of everyday life. But inside me is a very different reality.
I sometimes feel that the inevitable end to my life will be suicide; the only things to be decided are the how and the when. How many people could you say that to without frightening them? Yet this for me is normality. I am not depressed. But I need to know that if the pain of my experience ever gets to an unbearable stage, I have a way out. I repeat, I am not depressed.
I am upset today because of all the media articles on the subject of abuse, but I don't feel any nearer suicide today than I did a month ago.
I live alone because I find safety in my aloneness. I could not imagine myself other than living alone. I need safety. Apart from the immediate trauma of my sexual abuse, one of the things I lost was my ability to trust. Through my experience as a child, the world became an unsafe place. All my ideas of protection and safety were shattered and have never been repaired.
I have had counselling - excellent counselling - and have gained hugely from the experience. I certainly would not be thinking this, never mind writing it, if I had not had counselling. I even considered becoming a counsellor - and haven't dismissed the idea completely. But I find the intimate contact with people that counselling entails difficult to deal with.
In fact, I find any type of intimate contact with people difficult to deal with. Actually, it doesn't have to be intimate contact at all. Contact with people is difficult - full stop.
If I were to look for a diagnosis, I probably have social phobia. The idea of going out socially terrifies me. I do have some very good friends who know my story and fully accept me as I am. I found myself recently unable to go to the 50th birthday party of a very good friend. But she understood that meeting for lunch was much more comfortable for me.
While I don't want a hectic social life, it would be nice to have a real choice. Yes, I'm sure there is probably help available out there for this particular problem, and I may well look for some, but I mention it merely as part of my story.
I have never felt able to tell any of my family about my abuse. To my knowledge, my parents were not aware of it at the time. Certainly it was never mentioned. My mother is still alive, as are my brothers and sisters, and we have a superficially okay relationship. But in reality I feel extremely isolated and excluded from my family. It is as if they all belong to a club that I am not allowed to join. This is in no way to place any blame on them. How could I expect them to understand or support me in something of which they are completely unaware?
Why don't I tell them? We are back to fear again. In order to talk to any of my siblings, I would need to feel strong enough myself to take any possible reaction they might have - disbelief, rejection or whatever. Given that I don't feel close to them anyway, what have I got to lose? I don't know. Perhaps superficial contact is better than no contact at all. Do I know that that is what would happen? No, but I am afraid it might.
Recently I have been thinking that perhaps my 50th birthday present to myself might be to talk to some of my family about my abuse, but who knows? There is inside me an anger, a rage that frightens me sometimes. Outwardly I am extremely placid, but believe me I am angry. Do I have a focus for this anger? No!
In the past I directed it at myself and have hurt myself in various ways. Always very subtly so nobody ever knew. On a couple of occasions I was hospitalised, but again always had a plausible story to explain the injuries. Looking back on these episodes, apart from the self-loathing which they portray, I think sometimes the emotional pain was so bad that if I could inflict a greater degree of physical pain on myself, it somehow overshadowed the emotional pain and was more bearable. Now I can rationalise this anger more easily and haven't hurt myself for a few years.
I think that having told my counsellor about the self-harming, the shame was so great that it has kept me from doing it recently as I feel that I would have to disclose it.
The fact that I do not have children is a source of great sadness to me. I doubt that I could have sustained a relationship with a man, so I probably would have been a single parent. Would I have been a good mother? Who knows?
Would I have damaged children of my own? I don't mean sexually, because if I even conceived of the notion that I could possibly harm as much as a hair on a child's head, I would not want to go on living. But would I have inflicted emotional and psychological harm on my children? Would I have behaved in such a way as to cause them to resent me, or even hate me? I don't know. Sometimes I tell myself that this might have happened but I think perhaps it is just a way of consoling myself for the fact that I don't have any.
So how do I live my life? As I said earlier, I live alone and in my aloneness I find safety. For me, safety is paramount. If you met me would you realise all this about me? No! You would not. I would probably appear perfectly normal. I write this, not as a "victim of childhood sexual abuse," not even as a "survivor of childhood sexual abuse".
I write it as an adult living a productive life who happens to have been brutally sexually abused as a young child. I write it to try to portray in some kind of concrete way what is part, and I mean just part, of the long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse. I do not presume to speak for anybody else apart from myself.
But I feel that the potential damage done by abusers needs to be portrayed in some sort of tangible way. Do those who are apologising have a clue what they are apologising for? It is not something that happened back then.
Childhood sexual abuse is not an event. It is an ongoing life experience.
Can I say that my life would be different if I hadn't been sexually abused? No, I cannot. I can say only that this is a part of my life and I was sexually abused.
Do I know that my life would not be like this had I not been abused? No, I do not. Because I do not know, cannot know, nor will I ever know what it is like not to have been sexually abused.
The name of the author has been changed to protect her privacy but she can be contacted on lcor90@hotmail.com