Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor...

I feel that some people have a hard time with the truths around us, not only the sexual abuse by priests, but all bad things. I call it chosen ignorance. This modified form of ignorance...

Actually, nothing hurts like hearing the word slut, unless it is hearing the word rape dropped about carelessly. Again, a word I wouldn’t have thought much about, except that when I was in high school...

The more I learn, the less I know: the less I know, the less I understand: the less I understand, the less I can relate; I know you’re crazy.

Mum was pregnant, then there was Sharron. […]I wanted to keep him away from her – but for the wrong reasons. In my head he was mine, he was my special person but, of course,...

Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.

I am not sure if we are numbed to the reality of rape, but here’s the sad irony. While the word rape can add an edginess to your language, talking about actual rape is taboo....

Oddly then, in our search for meaning, we often assign victims too much blame for their assaults, and offenders too little. Our inconsistencies do not seem to trouble us, but they are truly puzzling. After...

… you sometimes had to force people to say things they would rather not articulate, just so they could hear their own words. It was interesting the way people could know things and not know...

Violators cannot live with the truth: survivors cannot live without it. There are those who still, once again, are poised to invalidate and deny us. If we don’t assert our truth, it may again be...

DENIAL OF EMOTIONSOur culture does not handle emotions well. We like folks to be happy and fine. We learn rituals of acting happy and fine at an early age. I can remember many times telling...

We mute the realization of malevolence- which is too threatening to bear – by turning offenders into victims themselves and by describing their behavior as the result of forces beyond their control.

As the incidence and fear of rape on college campuses have increased, the term rape has been generalized to mean ‘misuse; diminish the effects of; steal; defeat’: “I just went to the mall and raped...

What a brilliant cover story. In a success-obsessed society like this one, what’s the best rock to hide something under? It’s the rock called failure.

In all the interviews I have done, I cannot remember one offender who did not admit privately to more victims than those for whom he had been caught. On the contrary, most offenders had been...

Today’s society is wanting in such a way that Honor, Integrity, Trust, Compassion, Empathy are left for the homeless and their pets.

And the victim must have been broken and must remain so, so that the externalization of evil is possible. The victim who refuses to assume this role contradicts society’s simplistic view. Nobody wants to see...

over and over victims are blamed for their assaults. and when we imply that victims bring on their own fates – whether to make ourselves feel more efficacious or to make the world seem just...

I find it disturbing that one anthropologist’s readings of transcripts are being listened to more seriously than 40 senior health service clinicians.[Referring to Jean La Fontaine’s 1994 research paper for the DOH]

All I wanted to do was hide away from the world, but I still had a role to play. I had to be ‘Girl A’ – the key witness in the trial that finally saw...

…victims of violent crime are not always believed…[referring to victim testimony at serial killer and pedophile Marc Detroux’s trial]

DENIALDefense mechanism in which the existence of unpleasant realities is disavowed; refers to keeping out of conscious awareness any aspects of external reality that, if acknowledged, would produce anxiety.

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...

the customs of society and laws of the State allowed it to crush my aspirations and barred me from the the pursuit of almost every object worthy of an intelligent, rational mind.”45 What law has...

people do not emphasize with victims and give them limitless sympathy, but can very quickly switch to aggression and rejection

The truth is: Everyone will judge you. But this depends upon your intellectual capacity whether you are able to distinguish constructive criticism between an insult coming from other people’s opinions about you.

He pulled my skirt up. I began to worry. Everyone knew he had broken in girls before and I didn’t want it to happen to me. I said, ‘No. Get off, please.’ He pulled me...

I used to pray you know, pray to God that He would somehow stop it. All the nights of listening to my mother scream and things breaking. Of holding my brother and sister and listening...

We live in a world in which women are battered and are unable to flee from the men who beat them, although their door is theoretically standing wide open. One out of every four women...

Unlike other forms of psychological disorders, the core issue in trauma is reality.

In 2011, actor Johnny Depp told the November issue of Vanity Fair that he felt participating in a photoshoot was akin to rape.”Well, you just feel like you’re being raped somehow. Raped . . ....

Our society needs criminals like Wolfgang Priklopil in order to give a face to the evil that lives within and to split it off from … It needs the images of cellar dungeons so as...

The scientific study of suffering inevitably raises questions of causation, and with these, issues of blame and responsibility. Historically, doctors have highlighted predisposing vulnerability factors for developing PTSD, at the expense of recognizing the reality...

You’re the Executive Director of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation – a foundation that says it wants to disseminate scientific information to the community regarding this syndrome but you can’t, or won’t, give me its...

The themes that exercised the minds of survivor movements and their allies within the health and welfare professions generated a political project: how to revolutionise medical and judicial approaches to injured adults and children, how...

You see, Risa, survival is a dance between our needs and our consciences. When the need is great enough, and the music loud enough, we can stomp conscience into the ground.’Risa closes her eyes. She...

It is indeed the truth of the traumatic experience that forms the center of its psychopathology; it is not a pathology of falsehood or displacement of meaning, but of history itself” (p. 5)

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.”...

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...

moral panic”.Salter, M. (2011), Organized abuse and the politics of disbelief.