Another preoccupation fed into this dynamic relationship between discovery and denial: does sexual abuse actually matter? Should it, in fact, be allowed? After all, it was only in the 19070s that the Paedophile Information Exchange...

There were other strange signals and signs. Another day, suddenly felt an almost overwhelming urge to travel to Balitmore. I wanted to ‘kidnap’ a helicoper fly it there if I didn’t drive the there’, she...

The vast majority of incest begins years before the earliest conceivable age of consent. p4

Why did I allow the abuse to continue? Even as a teenager?I didn’t. Something that had been plaguing me for years now made sense. It was like the answer to a terrible secret. The thing...

He says, “I would walk around the township and I could point them out, which girls had been abused. You could see it in them. There’s a luminosity to incest. The taboo is so strong...

Coming to terms with incest is not easy. Learning to be a survivor, not a victim, gives new meaning to life

Janna knew – Rikki knew — and I knew, too — that becoming Dr Cameron West wouldn’t make me feel a damn bit better about myself than I did about being Citizen West. Citizen West,...

The healing process is best described as a spiral. Survivors go through the stages once, sometimes many times; sometimes in one order, sometimes in another. Each time they hit a stage again, they move up...

Become your own soulmate. Then you’ll always have someone watching your back, and you’ll always have someone who loves you.

In this book we paint an unprecedented portrait of Britain’s first ‘false memory’ retraction and show that, like other ‘false memory’ cases which appeared in the public domain, memory itself was always a false trail...

The Kinsey staff asked questions of children, learning about sexuality in the family. And other psychologists, psychiatrists and paediatricians, including Benjamin Spock, explored this burgeoning field. As a result, it was known that children will...

On top of the abuse and neglect, denial heaps more hurt upon the child by requiring the child to alienate herself from reality and her own experience. In troubled families, abuse and neglect are permitted;...

As a child I had been taken to see Dr Bradshaw on countless occasions; it was in his surgery that Billy had first discovered Lego. As I was growing up, I also saw Dr Robinson,...

Treating Abuse Today 3(4) pp. 26-33While Pamela Freyd was speaking to us on the record about her organization, another development was in the making in the Freyd family. Since Pamela and her husband, Peter Freyd,...

It is acknowledged that father-daughter incest occurs on a large scale in the United States. Sexual abuse has now been included in child abuse legislation. A conservative estimate is that more than 1 million women...

Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family,...

I felt like an animal, and animals don’t know sin, do they?

I used to teach at an abused children’s home. I told the kids, “You all have a manure pile of memories. Nothing you can do about that. Now you can drown in the stink or...

The survivor movements were also challenging the notion of a dysfunctional family as the cause and culture of abuse, rather than being one of the many places where abuse nested. This notion, which in the...

She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls’ hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to.

But then, not long after, in another article, Loftus writes, “We live in a strange and precarious time that resembles at its heart the hysteria and superstitious fervor of the witch trials.” She took rifle...

It’s hard to feel supported when you can’t tell people everything. People haven’t really got a clue what it’s like. It’s hard to trust anyone. It’s hard to believe people won’t let you down. I’m...

Treating Abuse Today 3(4) pp. 26-33TAT: I see the agenda. But let’s go back: one of the contentions the therapeutic community has about the Foundation’s professed scientific credibility is your use of the term “syndrome.”...

In general, the more dysfunctional the family the more inappropriate their response to disclosure. Never expect a sane response from an insane system.

Each night I am nailed into placeand forget who I am.Daddy? That’s another kind of prison.It’s not the prince at all, but my fatherdrunkeningly bends over my bed, circling the abyss like a shark, my...

All emotions, even those that are suppressed and unexpressed, have physical effects. Unexpressed emotions tend to stay in the body like small ticking time bombs—they are illnesses in incubation.

It’s not your fault you had an unwanted dick in you.

The discovery that detonated Cleveland is one of Britain’s great contributions to awareness of child abuse. In 1986 and 1987 the Leeds paediatricians Dr Jane Wynne and Dr Christopher Hobbs reported in the Lancet that...

She couldn’t get any farther away inside from her skin. She couldn’t get away.

Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory...

Weird? Absurd? That’s how it seemed to me. I had these forces, these compunctions, these alternative personalities inside me, driving me. It was like being a jack-in-the-box and I was unsure which personality was going...

Early relational trauma results from the fact that we are often given more to experience in this life than we can bear to experience consciously. This problem has been around since the beginning of time,...

Children who are victimized through sexual abuse often begin to develop deeply held tenets that shape their sense of self: ‘My worth is my sexuality. I’m dirty and shameful. I have no right to my...

Are you going to spank me, daddy? I’m a very bad girl! (bending over naked)”Oh yeah daddy – spank my ass harder!!!

Without realizing it, I fought to keep my two worlds separated. Without ever knowing why, I made sure, whenever possible that nothing passed between the compartmentalization I had created between the day child and the...

Just as verbally and physically abused children internalize blame, so do incest victims. However, in incest, the blame is compounded by the shame. The belief that ‘it’s all my fault’ is never more intense than...

The BFMSS [British False Memory Syndrome Society]The founder of the ‘false memory’ movement in Britain is an accused father. Two of his adult daughters say that Roger Scotford sexually abused them in childhood. He denied...

After they broke up, Renaldo’s ex girlfriend said to never again date an older woman. And he wisely listened to her, because his mother only had his best interest in mind.

There are a range of useful and illuminating analyses of the media construction of organised abuse as it became front-page news in the 1980s and 1990s (Kitzinger 2004, Atmore 1997, Kelly 1998), but this book...

The odd sensation I had while cooking would often last through the meal, then dissolve as I climbed the stairs. I would enter my room and discover the homework books I had left on the...

Along with the trust issues, one of the hardest parts to deal with is the feeling of not being believed or supported, especially by your own grandparents and extended family. When I have been through...

from: The Portrayal of Child Sexual Assault in Introductory Psychology Textbooks – Elizabeth J. Letourneau, Tonya C. LewisOne of the central questions surrounding the debate on memories of CSA is how often false or repressed...

…Incest is rape by extortion. Thus the child’s very childhood becomes a weapon used to control her.

so that it isn’t upsetting to anybody. It’s something we’ve always known about fairy tales – they talk about incest, the Oedipus complex, about psychotic mothers, like those of Snow White and Hansel and Gretel,...

For all this talk about us being a nation at war with child abuse, and for all the media hype about witch-hunts and false allegations — and don’t ever let anyone use the word witch-hunts...

In some very rare cases, an opposite-sex pair was born, and they always mated one another. Disturbing as it might sound, when it did happen, the offspring were invariably gifted. Sera and Trace’s sons were...

One’s child is always one’s child no matter what age they might be. You worry when your child makes a noise, when he doesn’t. It’s a terrible kind of love. Terrible.

As mandatory reporting laws and community awareness drove an increase its child protection investigations throughout the 1980s, some children began to disclose premeditated, sadistic and organised abuse by their parents, relatives and other caregivers such...