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EmailSexual Abuse of Child Survivors of the Shoah: A Personal Perspective from the Second Generation
By Dr. Jean Adler, Registered Psychologist
Vancouver, Canada
I would welcome any responses to this report of my thoughts and experiences on this subject. Jean Adler
I’ve worked for almost twenty years now with adults who were sexually abused when they were children. Many of my clients have been members of Canada’s First Nations, abused in the now infamous residential schools that were operated by the churches to assimilate First Nations’ children into Euro-Canadian society. Other clients were abused in foster homes or by family members—older siblings, parents, step-parents, uncles, older cousins—or by family friends or teachers or coaches or youth group leaders. There have been others abused by doctors or dentists. Any adult in a position of authority/ power over children is positioned to abuse these children if the adult is so inclined.
I know from my experience with these adult Survivors that the psychic wound caused by the sexual violation of children is profound. Just getting to the point of being able to talk about what happened or what is remembered of what happened is in itself a long process involving the client’s development of deep trust in her/his therapist. Only then comes the gradual realization that the abuse was not the fault of the child, the working through of the rage with the adults who betrayed the child’s trust and the ultimate recovery of self-esteem that has been crippled since the time of the abuse.
I am also a child of Survivors and I attended the annual International Child Survivors and Second Generation Conference in October, 2002 in Toronto. This happened to be the first of these conferences at which a workshop for child Survivors who had been sexually abused was scheduled.
It occurred to me at the conference that the child Survivors, who were hidden, usually by non-Jewish families, were particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse. Not only did the adults around them have power over them, but the children were hidden, invisible, and so without recourse.
Child Survivors of the Shoah who were sexually abused are apparently just getting to the point of being able to talk about what happened or what they remember of what happened. Most of the attendees had already attended several of these conferences and they were just coming to trust the conference process and the participants sufficiently to begin to acknowledge in this safe context these deepest of wounds.
I did not attend the sexual abuse workshops, but I heard that they were appreciated.
When I had some time to myself after the conference, my thoughts turned to my mother. She was a terrified eighteen year old on Kristallnacht in 1938 when her father’s business in Vienna was looted and he was imprisoned in Dachau. A job as a housemaid was arranged for her in Birmingham, England and she escaped a month later. She told me once (long before I became a psychologist) that the man of this house had attempted to rape her. After my realization at the conference of how vulnerable hidden child Survivors were to sexual abuse, I recognized that my mother had almost certainly understated her experience when she blurted it out to me, her adolescent daughter. It seems to me likely that my mother was a victim of sexual abuse while she lived in that home in Birmingham.
I remember her striking me in mute fury when I began as an adolescent to flirt with boys. I learned quickly from her behaviour that my sexuality was cause for shame and that it should be hidden, at least from her view.
I learned much later that she had tolerated my father’s sexual infidelities. She disclosed them to me after his death, considering herself fortunate that he hadn’t left her for another woman. My mother withdrew into dementia shortly after she disclosed this to me. Nonetheless my recognition of my mother’s sexual abuse has allowed me to better understand her lifelong silence and passivity.
Sexual Abuse: Keeping the Secret
Victims of sexual abuse usually keep their experience secret. Because this secrecy is so common, we can assume that some victims never tell anyone, keeping the secret until the end of their lives. It is especially victims of childhood or adolescent sexual abuse that tend to keep it secret. Victims who do disclose their long held secrets, often to their psychotherapists, offer many explanations as to why they have never told anyone before. I’ve listed some of these below:
The abuser may have threatened the victim with dire consequences if she* should tell. He* might have said that he would find out if she told and that he would come back and punish her or even kill her.
He might have told her that no one will ever believe her if she should try to tell.
He might have offered her some “reward” after she he has abused her, such as candy or a gift of some sort. Then he might have told her that he and she were partners in the abuse experience and that they needed to be partners in keeping it secret.
The abuse may have taken place when the victim was very young and her memory of it may be fragmentary or perhaps only a “body memory”, something that cannot be put into words, as the memories of young children tend to be. When she is older, she feels uncertain of this insubstantial memory and she assumes that others would also doubt such a memory, so she keeps it secret.
The abuse experience may have been so traumatic that the victim has entirely repressed or “forgotten” that it happened. This forgetting involves dissociating or escaping in her mind to some other place while the frightening abuse experience is taking place. Sometimes a repressed memory will surface at a later date, but the victim may not trust such a memory or she may feel guilty for not having had access to it before.
The victim may care for the abuser. He might have been a father, stepfather, older brother, uncle, or older cousin. She might then want to protect him from the negative repercussions of his behaviour.
He may have told her that the family would be broken up if she were to tell. Of course, for a child, already confused and suffering from the abuse, the loss of her family would seem catastrophic and to be avoided at all costs.
The victim may have found the abuse sexually stimulating or, especially if she had been neglected, she may have appreciated the attention that the abuser gave her along with the abuse. If the abuse has included a positive aspect, the victim will feel guilty for having “enjoyed” it and she will keep it secret to protect her own feeling of guilt.
The abuser may tell the victim that she has seduced him, that is, that he couldn’t stop himself from doing it and that it was her fault for being so attractive. Then she will believe that the abuse was her fault and her guilt will keep her silent.
The victim may not have come upon a supportive person whom she would consider telling. The victim may want to protect her loved ones from knowledge of the abuse that she believes would devastate them.
Children may learn in our culture that talk of sexual matters is a taboo.
The longer the victim keeps the secret, the more accustomed she becomes to living with the secret and the more difficult it becomes to consider disclosing it.
For reasons such as those listed above, the victim comes to feel shame about her abuse experience. Depending upon the specific circumstances of the abuse, the shame may be felt immediately or it may develop over time.
Shame: A painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety in one’s own behaviour or position or in the behaviour or position of a closely associated person. (Webster’s Dictionary)
For many victims of sexual abuse, shame comes to be the prevailing and enduring feeling associated with the abuse. Over time, this shame tends to generalize to the entire personhood of the victim. She then lives for years, perhaps for her entire life as I’ve suggested above, in a state of chronic painful shame.
Such chronic pain takes an emotional and sometimes a physical toll upon the victim. She becomes tense or anxious as she invests her energy into containing the secret. She may become depressed as she buries her anger about her victimhood or blames herself. In some cases, the consequences may be more severe: psychotic episodes or self-defeating behaviour patterns known as personality disorders.
Such suffering may eventually prompt her to disclose the secret in order to try to get relief. If she is wise enough or fortunate enough to find appropriate support for her disclosing, she may be able to “work through” the abuse and recover or develop a sense of herself freed from the experience of victimhood. If she is less fortunate, disclosing may only reinforce her shame and leave her feeling more helpless and more hopeless.
* In the interest of making this easy to read, I have used the stereotypical “she” to designate the victim and “he” to designate the abuser. Of course, victims are sometimes male and abusers are sometimes female.