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June 21, 2005

Sex abuse victims suffer in silence. For years.

When Emma was 11, she was sent to spend the summer with her grandmother, aunt and uncle outside of Florida. One warm, muggy night she bedded down on the living room sofa in short, flowery pajamas. Soon everyone in the house had fallen asleep except the uncle who stayed up late to watch a baseball game and who did not turn the TV sound down when he crept over to the snoozing child and stuck his finger inside her vagina.

Emma awoke, shocked and terrified. 'I was thinking, 'I can't believe this is happening. This is my uncle, the guy who taught me how to fish. Yuck!' '' she says, hurt and outrage undimmed after more than two decades.

As the lanky man, by then well into his 60s, walked nonchalantly away, she watched the familiar bushy hair, bare back and green pajama bottoms disappear through the kitchen and into a bedroom near the back of the house, Emma hoped she was dreaming. But she was not. The next night, he assaulted her again. On the third night, Emma stayed awake, and when her uncle tugged at the sheet she had wrapped mummy-tight around her body, she wanted to scream ''Go away!'' But she did not scream, and, stymied and perhaps fearful of discovery, he gave up.

Though the high-profile accusations against Michael Jackson and the pedophile-priest scandals generate air time and lurid headlines, the sexual abuse of children almost always occurs under a shroud of silence, its victims small, powerless, often voiceless, its shame and agony reverberating through the coming years as symptoms of anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder, its eroding effects on even the most superficial pleasures of adult life often incalculable.

At 37, Emma is climbing the executive ladder with a major corporation in Broward, a well-educated woman of some standing within her profession and community, but until now she seldom has talked about her experience, and she will not allow her real name to be used.

PREVALENT IN THIS COUNTRY

Emma may be faceless in this story, but she is not alone. By age 18, 20 percent of all girls in this country and about 10 percent of boys will have been sexually abused, says David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center in Durham, N.H. If AmericanAirlines Arena were filled to its capacity with 19,600 women, 3,920 of them -- more than enough to fill the upper balconies -- would have been abuse victims. If the arena were filled with men, the figure would be 1,960, more than enough to fill the suite level twice.

The number of abuse cases substantiated by child-protection service agencies throughout the United States shrank by about 40 percent between 1992 and 2000, from 150,000 to 89,500, Finkelhor says, a decline perhaps attributable to preventive measures or to a more aware and aggressive criminal-justice system. Or, he warns in a pessimistic report, there might in fact have been no decline; many cases just may not have been identified or reported because fear and embarrassment kept the victims mute.

In May, talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres disclosed that when she was a teenager her stepfather had fondled her breasts while her mother was ill with breast cancer, an incident that escalated into ''other things.'' In between 60 percent and 80 percent of child-abuse cases, Finkelhor says, the perpetrator is a family member or other authority figure, and the inappropriate behavior is not specific to any race, class or gender.

''It's lost innocence,'' says Dr. Jon Shaw, director of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Miami. ''The illusion of safety has been unmasked. The world is horrific, unpredictable. We all have the belief that good triumphs over evil.'' And although Shaw says that ''not all sexual abuse is excessively traumatic,'' as in the case of a father who disguises his motives by purring ''You're my special daughter,'' such betrayals make faith a lie and home a hell.

''Someone is supposed to love and take care of you,'' Shaw says, ``and then you discover the horrific nature of what one is exposed to.''

ABUSED AGAIN AND AGAIN

A few years after her uncle molested her, Emma was abused again and again by other relatives, three cousins and two other uncles. She now despises family gatherings -- ''There are certain relatives I don't feel comfortable around'' -- and she sleeps beneath her aptly named comforter all year long: ''Without it, I'd stay awake all night.'' And she has not had a fulfilling romantic relationship since 1991.

''I wanted to leap over the balcony when one guy stood me up,'' she says. ``Maybe I'm not relationship material.''

Like many other victims, Emma finds that certain sensory reminders may suddenly resurrect corrosive feelings of guilt and shame. ''I'll get tense when people look at me a certain way,'' she says. ''Do I smell like prey? Do they think I'm an easy target? And if they chew tobacco'' -- like her uncle -- ``or like to go fishing. . . .

''I know,'' she says with a deep sigh, ``this sounds crazy.''

But it's not crazy. Some abuse victims ''will have a hard time developing deep relationships with other people, even of a nonsexual nature,'' says Dr. Alan A. Jaffe of Coral Springs, a psychologist and Emma's therapist. ''I hate it when people want to hug me,'' Emma admits. ``I don't even like to hug my mother.''

Helen Schuster, a licensed clinical social worker in Pinecrest, says that behavior therapies that dispel the notion of victim mentality can sometimes help people such as Emma. ''As the victim stops thinking of himself as a victim, he becomes self-empowering,'' Schuster says. ''Not that [the abuse] is not going to affect us. But we need to look at it more objectively.'' For a long time Emma was convinced she was at fault because her uncle had assaulted her twice. ''Did that mean I enjoyed it?'' she wondered. ``I mean, I could've screamed or something.''

Schuster says that the father of one of her patients abused her, ''intercourse and everything,'' from the time she was small. ''When she was a teenager, she realized she didn't want to do it anymore,'' Schuster says. ``Her explanation was if her mother hadn't died young, her father wouldn't have had to do that. She had a really hard time looking at the fact that here's a full-grown man, and this child had nothing to do with it.''

Victims ''sometimes take emotional responsibility for the behavior of other people,'' Jaffe says. 'The abuser doesn't take responsibility. He might say, `Look at the dress you were wearing. You were asking for it.' '' Even when the victim knows otherwise, such doubts and worries are hard to stifle. Still, nowadays whenever Emma sees a child who appears to be about 11, she confirms how powerless she must have been: ``Compared to grown men, kids this age are like fine china.''

Emma admits that though she still has a hard time trusting anyone, she regards relatives as particularly suspect. Although children who report abuse to responsive mothers generally heal quicker, Schuster says, Emma did not tattle on her uncle because she feared her mother would be unresponsive. (Years later, when news of Kobe Bryant's rape case first aired, her mother's reaction was, ''Oh, these women need to stop!'') Emma kept quiet because she was terrified of her mother's scalding temper. ''She was so self-centered and narcissistic,'' Emma says. ``Always yelling, always screaming. . . . I used to think it was normal for a kid to walk around with welts on her arms and legs.''

Still, Emma often wonders why her mother never sensed that something was amiss that summer. 'She called and asked if I wanted to stay longer, and I said, `No.' '' Emma says. ``She didn't ask why, and I didn't tell. Back home, when she bought me new school clothes, I didn't want to try them on in front of her. When she bought me this really skimpy bathing suit, I didn't want to wear it. And it was all a joke to her.''

When Emma finally walked through the door of Jaffe's office about two years ago, she had not come, she insists, to talk about sex abuse. ''I didn't intend to discuss those issues,'' she says. 'I went for anger issues, but he suspected something, because he asked `Do you have a problem with men?' I was shocked. This was my little secret.''

''Sometimes you have to bring the patient back to the situation and have them go through it,'' Jaffe says.

Schuster uses a similar approach. ``What I'll do is a debriefing technique. . . . You'll go through everything you saw, heard. It brings back memories that you have forgotten. Abuse . . . is very sensory. Particularly if it's oral sex. A lot of people have trouble with that. . . . They might come in here and say they feel like they're choking on their food. . . . A debriefing brings all that back.''

Emma's uncle, her first abuser, died of cancer three years after the attacks. With the cousins and other uncles, ''It's like, I was trapped, no way out.'' One uncle insisted his actions were justified because he and Emma were not biologically related. One cousin, a preacher, called her a few years ago and apologized. ''Maybe he was in some kind of 12-step program,'' she says. ``I give him credit for apologizing.''

She still thinks, as anyone would, about what happened to her, and she is still angry, mostly at her unapproachable mother, and she wonders if tattling would have done any good.

''I could have screamed or something,'' she says. A few days before the first attack, her uncle had patted her on the thigh while they were alone in his car. ''I just thought he was being friendly,'' she says. ''Come on. I was 11.'' Besides, he was the fun uncle who taught her how to fish, the one all the kids adored. ``I called home and told everybody I caught seven fish. And my fish were bigger than his.''

Posted by Nealus at June 21, 2005 12:02 PM

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