05/06/2007

Column hits a nerve for some readers

By Kathy Gibbons
Features editor
kgibbons@
record-eagle.com

Read Kathy's past columns here

Last week's column about a 16-year-old who had written a poem expressing anger and anguish over being sexually abused by her stepbrother for five years struck a chord with some readers.

I thought it would. I have long believed that there are far more women with memories like this girl's than statistics suggest. Too many keep such childhood events to themselves and don't tell — especially those now middle-aged and older. Those things weren't talked about when we were girls.

Just in my own small-town teen life, I had a friend who, at age 13, was raped in a barn by the boy across the road. Both had horses and had ridden together for years. She never told.

I've written before about spending the night at my best friend's house when I was 15, sleeping on the living room floor with a space heater because their furnace was broken.

It was 3 a.m. when I awoke to find myself nose to nose with her dad, his warm alcohol-fueled breath in my face, his hands rubbing between my legs, which thankfully were covered in layers of tights. Startled, I said his name, apparently loud enough for his wife to call worriedly from their room, "Bill?! Bill?!” He left.

I refused to spend the night there again, and never told until years later when her little sister ran away from home because he was sexually abusing her. Turned out he'd also been raping an older daughter — maybe my friend, too, though she never would say.

The letters after last week were a mix — from women who had similar experiences, and from a pastor who urged counseling to deal with the anger.

Wrote one woman, "I am a survivor and it was hatred that kept me from true healing for a very long time.”

Another described an experience similar to this girl's, at the hands of her brother, also over five years.

"He took my innocence, my childhood and my adulthood,” she wrote. "Failed relationships, barely making it by in school when I could have excelled. A divorce. It took me 44 years to deal with it.”

But after intense counseling, she has been able to "let go of my own guilt.”

"This young lady…is so lucky that it came out at the age it did, instead of 50 years from now,” she wrote. "With good therapy, she can get past it. It will always affect who she is … but the healing can start so much sooner than it did for me.”

Wrote another victim, "People think that 'it' only happens in families that 'look' a certain way … not in 'good' families.”

Meanwhile, this girl had said that in the five years she was being molested, there were many "almosts” — times she almost told her parents. She wishes now she had, and wants other girls to know that they should.

"I'd say TELL because it's going to make your life a lot easier,” she said. "It's hard at first, but it gets easier as time goes on.

"At first I was ashamed. I felt that way for a while. Then I realized I shouldn't. I recognized that it wasn't my fault.”