Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Someone Else's Secret
I was talking to a friend at work about the girlfriend of a relative of a relative who was raped by her father and her uncle from the time she was 9 until she was 14. The worst part about it was that she is deaf and the family never taught her any way to communicate so she could never tell. When she was finally sent to a school for the deaf she learned ASL and how to text but she can't read or write and she won't tell on her dad and uncle because even thought she could legally they are the sole providers for all her siblings and her mom. My friend said she understood and she had the same problem with her brother. That he had three kids and a wife to take care of and that he was only a kid when it happened. I was like WHAT?!!? My friend was raped by her brother. And now the brother and his wife are bringing the kids to the program we work at once a week. I can't even look him. And my friend is still close to her brother. It weirds me out.
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5 comments:
That is HORRIBLE. I don't blame you for looking at him differently. Although if she has not severed all contact with her brother then perhaps they reconciled in their own way?
The thing about sexual assault is that no survivor really handles it in the same way. People are sometimes surprized to find out, especially in the case of incest, that the victim doesn't always want the perpetrator to go to jail or get in trouble. Sometimes they are mad at the person for doing what they did, but they still protect them because they are family.
Of course you look at the perpetrator differently. Any normal person would. Knowing that about someone is a really hard thing to deal with.
That seems bizarre to me, but I've heard/read that things that happen to a child usually seem "normal" to the child--that is, they don't realize it's not the same in all families. It's a good survival mechanism, and probably makes things confusing later on when they DO realize.
That hurts my heart. To think that a child doesn't know right from wrong because they have only know that way to live. It just hurts.
How awful! A was once friends with a gal whose older sister was raped by their father. (He died before he got to my younger friend.)
She was impregnated by her father at 15, her mother didn't believe the father could do anything like that and sent her off to have the baby pretending she was doing some exchange work.
Fast forward about 15 years and she names her only son AFTER HER FATHER.
To be frank, I just never understood that.
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