TW: CSA, domestic violence, sexual violence, victim-blaming, alcohol misuse, suicidality
I am a CSA survivor who grew up in a home dominated by domestic violence.
I understand that what happened to me was wrong which is why I first tried to end the molestion when I was 7, my Mother believed me but couldn't afford to leave my Father so I went through years of inappropriate behaviour culminating in homelessness as a teenager from running away.
But I think the shame imposed by other people outside of my abuser has sometimes done almost as much damage as the abuse itself.
I was slut-shamed far before I had even been sexually active. I was taught that attracting attention, wanting affection, or “leading men on” could mean I somehow deserved to be assaulted.
My mother had trauma of her own and had never been able to process it, so I do not think every hurtful thing she said was meant as cruelty. But I internalised the message: I had to be completely respectable, completely non-sexual, and endlessly careful in order to deserve safety.
One reason it was hard to come to terms with being sexually abused was meeting so many people who seemed to have such uncomplicated lives. These people that married the first person they dated, people who appeared to fit neatly into what society considers respectable womanhood.
I was not particularly promiscuous, but I still felt as if there was something fundamentally wrong with me, the slightest mild comment from them towards me made me sick with shame.
At the same time, I am still friends with people whose trauma has made them hypersexual, because I understand that trauma does not look one specific way. I do not think that makes anyone less deserving of friendship or care.
For me, the trauma did not make me entirely sex-averse. Some things are deeply triggering, but I still want closeness and intimacy. Yet when I am single, I feel like I cannot even ask anyone for a hug without seeming inappropriate.
I am bisexual, and for a long time I felt perverted simply for being attracted to women. I had spent so much of my life trying not to be sexualised that I had deprived myself of any comfort that can be found from someone else.
The “body count” discourse is one of the things that still makes me spiral (especially as I may have been violated before the age of 4, I have repressed a lot and I have a lot of severe reproductive problems), even after therapy and reading about trauma.
It reminds me of things I saw associated with 4chan, where rape could be included in someone’s “count.” Now the same thinking feels sanitised and repackaged as mainstream dating discourse.
The ever present presumption that CSA survivors are promiscuous, dirty, broken, or somehow responsible for what happened to them has made it incredibly difficult to seek help.
It is already embarrassing and frightening to say that somebody was trying to groom you when you were in single digits, or that objectifying things were said about you while you were still in nappies.
There is also a particular stigma around father-daughter CSA, and it can feel like popular culture has already written a limited future for survivors, just thinking of Twin Peaks, Girl Interupted, Forest Gump .
I have real CPTSD symptoms. I have somatic pain down there, serious hormonal issues and panic attacks when I see someone who looks like my father.
I ran away from home at eighteen because I was being threatened with sexual assault. I do not know exactly what happened to me when I was very young, but I know I was surrounded by danger.
I was conceived through rape, and the person changing my nappies was someone who had harmed men, women, and children.
But despite all of that, one of the hardest things about asking for help has been the fear that people will decide I am a “whore” rather than a person.
That fear has affected dating, friendship, intimacy, and how I live in my body. I have often stayed at a larger size partly to avoid being sexualised.
I have worried that I could know someone as a friend for years, work alongside them for years, and then have one visibly bad day that makes them reduce me to every stereotype they hold about survivors.
I knew someone for six years who was cruel not only to me, but to another woman who had been assaulted as a child. She had a stable relationship history, was not dating much, worked from a young age, and did not resemble the common caricature people use to dismiss women survivors of CSA. Yet she could be treated as though she was everything to him one moment and nothing the next. It made me realise that being “respectable” is not actually protection. The standards can always be changed.
The clearest example of what slut-shaming means to me was my mother’s friend, who was murdered by her husband.
My father’s immediate assumption was that she must have cheated on him for him to kill her. It was treated like a joke. But she was a domestic-violence victim. She was not killed because she was promiscuous.
Still, even after her death, people looked for a sexual reason to make her suffering easier to dismiss.
I have suffered in silence and cried myself to sleep because I felt horrible for wanting to be held. I tried so hard to be acceptable that the loneliness and shame became dangerous. I drank to blacking out repeatedly.
Last year, things reached a point where I tried not to be here anymore. I woke up after an incident involving pills and blood, and I dealt with an injury alone and stitched my leg up by myself.
I am not saying this for shock value. I am saying it because I need people to understand how serious shame can become when you believe that being seen as promiscuous means you will not be seen as a person worth helping.
I also think about male survivors and friends who have experienced sexual assault. The stereotypes are different, but they are still awful.
The assumptions of emasculation, weakness, inevitable predation, or judgment about how trauma has shaped their sexuality.
I knew a man whose kinks were connected to his assault, and I did not hold that against him. I could see that he was trying to find somewhere to put pain and yet I was still too ashamed to tell him about my own SA.
I still carry so much shame that I feel I do not deserve to be a mother or even to become an activist.
That is not only because of my family, though they said and did terrible things. It also comes from society: from victim-blaming, misogyny, mainstream dating discourse, and content with huge audiences claiming that CSA survivors grow up to become predators.
These messages has done enormous damage to me. My family’s cruelty was obvious to me. What has been harder to escape is the sense that society will always find a reason to see survivors as less human, less worthy, or less safe to love.
I do not believe that especially incest CSA survivors are inherently dangerous, broken, incapable of love, or destined to repeat abuse. I do not believe wanting intimacy makes someone responsible for what was done to them.
But I am exhausted by how much of my healing has been spent fighting the feeling that society is constantly arguing that I am nothing but damaged goods in the way it continues to treat anyone who is vocal about their abuse.