Forum; Childhood Stole: A Case of Incest

. From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is Forum. People are aware of abuse, but I think that people need to know or have it on a more personal level in order to do anything about it and in order to be willing to take the risk that need to be taken to stop it. Marcella Bryant, survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and John Boyle, executive director of Pebble Project, a child abuse prevention program.

Survivors is a term that is used by some people, although they're probably jargon in this area, that most people have their own vocabulary, so it gets real tricky, like to some people say adults molested as children and some people say survivors and some people don't like either one of those and have other terms, victims, etc. But it's someone who is usually molested as a child and is now learning how to survive that trauma. This is Olive Graham. The subject on Forum today is a sensitive one. The loss of a childhood to the ongoing threat of pain and terror is tragic, but it is made all the more horrible by the lack of recognition and support from society at large. The guests on Forum have first-hand information about the traumatic experience of childhood sexual abuse. Marcella Bryant is currently recovering from her own experience with family violence

and sexual abuse. At 30 years of age, she is in the tenuous position of rebuilding a childhood stolen and constructing an adulthood that will lack the underpinnings that a normal childhood would have provided. Marcella recounts the trauma of rediscovering the actual nature of her formative years. My story in a nutshell, I up until three and a half years ago thought that I had just a perfect life and I had a whole set of memories of this wonderful caring family that did things and went places and was always together. In 1980, I had two heat strokes and following those heat strokes started having pretty severe seizures that they could not find a cause for and had seizures for about six years that were like daily, weekly occurrences. I finally became so depressed because of the seizures that I was put into a hospital and at that time the physician had the insight to withdraw all of my seizure medication as

I was pretty heavily medicated. As soon as they took my medication away, I had my first memory of child abuse, have not had a seizure since that day. It's as soon as the memories of the abuse surfaced, kind of the somatic part of it just disappeared. And that just started the long process of real slowly bringing up memories and being able to deal with them as they surfaced. John Boyle is executive director of Pebble Project, an Austin, Texas organization that is part of a state and national network that maintains an active agenda of education and research into the area of child abuse. Pebble Project strives to stand the upsurge of this problem by their presentations and therapy sessions and local schools and by their efforts in aiding the legislative process deal with this uncomfortable topic. According to Mr. Boyle, the problem resides in all levels of society and treatment is slow and tricky.

He outlines the difficulties, John Boyle. A lot depends on motivation. Our system is not really very successful in keeping these perpetrators in treatment for a variety of reasons, although we do a lot better now than we've ever done. The thing that I think is the wisest things I've heard about it is that most of these mostly men who we seem to be all identify as perpetrators need to monitor themselves for the rest of their life, kind of like alcoholics, one day at a time, that once they've broken that taboo, that other things they could choose to do that again at different times. The other thing is that it does take long-term intensive treatment and the guys are continually lying and conning themselves and others about the fact that they are not ready to be out of treatment, that it is a very, very long process, if they're honest, which is not the case.

So there's a lot of denial, incredible amounts of denial. And most sexual abuse perpetrators are probably the best con artist that you'd ever want to meet when I ran the incest treatment program that we coordinated. I must have met over 500 of these guys and half the time I would believe their lives and I'd work with them, you know, but they're just so slick and so good. And most of the treatment people in the field say, you know, you need to work with other people so you can help one another because these guys are just too good at their line, you know. Are they sociopathic? That's a real difficult question to answer because by all of our normal standards we would say so, but we don't normally call. I don't know, they lie to themselves and they lie to others and part of the reason they're so good at presenting the front is that they believe they're on lies. So in one sense they appear to be sociopaths and a few by testing R, but that's probably only about 10%.

So just into a category that we don't like to face in our society of people who have lied so skillfully and so long that the layers of lies go so deep, it's hard to find the truth very often. So they don't use remorse. Those terms usually are not successful because these guys tend to use anything on the front end like remorse or forgiveness, they'll be the first ones to say, I'm sorry, I won't do it again, I don't know what I was thinking, I'm well now can I go? And somebody says yes. If people are not trained in this area, yeah, there's a lot of therapists in town who are often get these guys because these guys try to find therapists that they can con and so usually you have to really be careful about who you refer these guys to. Aren't we talking about behavior that's a felony here?

Yeah, yeah, that's a felony. So they have a criminal kind of mind. Well, the reason I asked that is because I'm wondering aren't you sometimes treating them in wherever they happen to be incarcerated? Right, seven out of eight of them get probation or not sent to prison. And then there is a large population like my father who lives in a big fancy house and walks the street and is real available to abuse anybody that he happens to run into. And there's nothing legally that I can do about it. You ask earlier what prompted me partly to do the book and part of that is that is the only justice that I will ever have, the legal system can do nothing at all for adult survivors. Because of statutes of limitation? And you know, by the nature of the beast, a lot of women have repressed everything and don't remember or don't aren't able to deal with it until it's far too late to get

any kind of legal support or justice from that. Have you been able to confront your father from a position of strength? I don't know how strong I was at the point. I certainly have confronted him and have confronted him within the framework of the Incess Treatment Program. And my father's line, he is certainly a very socially oriented person. So his response has been, oh, I'm sure I did all of those things, but I don't remember. I know that he remembers. I have no doubt about that, but that's kind of what he said. But why wouldn't he be able to shield them away from recall or recognition just the way you might have? Why wouldn't that be the case? Because I don't think it was nearest dramatic for him. You know, I think that he is a real disturbed man, but I also believe he's real aware.

I can remember one incident in that group where someone brought up a specific incident that happened to me. The look on his face was of absolute recognition. He knew what they were talking about, and he said, gosh, I can't help you. I'm sure I did all those things, but I just don't remember. Why is it that probation would be the penalty? Whether it's a variety of reasons, the prison overcrowding is one. Another is that in our society, we really give real mixed messages about how to handle this. On one hand, there is a segment of the community that believes treatment can be helpful. On the other hand, there is a lot of the community that feels you should lock them up forever,

but since the prisons are full and since that usually doesn't get always acted upon, it doesn't. Our community has kind of come to some kind of a disjointed compromise. Still, for every conviction, there's four to ten perpetrators out there who will never be convicted. Four to ten times as much sexual abuse occurs that never comes to criminal court at all. Many more than that, that's just a guest. Our society really doesn't know what to do with these guys, and they've tried some things, but we're still real new and all that. In pursuit of restoring her life, Marcella Bryant has written a recently published book of poetry entitled Ancient Child, that traces in a non-narrative format, her trek through childhood tears and blood to higher ground. It started writing very shortly after all of this came up, and I think some of the better poems are those that were written at three o'clock in the morning when I was just did not know what to do with myself.

I probably went a year and a half with writing just for myself, and as a therapeutic means, the book came about, probably about two years ago, when I spoke with the editor of the press, and she was interested in collecting the poems into book form. And then it started evolving into that, but even so, even though I knew it was going to be a book, the writing has been real therapeutic, and that's its primary intent. Would you select one and read it for us? Okay. This is a poem that I wrote, a lot of my memories came back in dreams, or nightmares. And the nightmares were pretty much exaggerated forms of the abuse, but one incident, my father took his keys and put him in his hands as if a fist and scratched the front of me, and

this is a dream that kind of relates, that experience, it's called shredding dreams. Wandering aimlessly about a great yellow space doesn't appear to be an enclosed room. How curious, just bright, yellow, and nothing more as far as the eye can see. Afraid? No, I don't think so, just puzzled. Where's the door? Stop! One has my ankles paralyzing me to this spot. Cold iron hands on bare white skin, please let me go. Your only dreaming I hear myself say no need to be scared. But I am, and he's here and I can't move. Hell is the impossibility of reason, they say. I wonder if they really know about images of hell as he moves deliberately up my body, slowly removes my clothes, not overtly violent, but angry and threatening, controlled.

He still has my ankles, I can't get away and I'm scared, filled with dread because I know what's to come, and it does, the shredding. He takes out his keys, all nine, curled around a generic ring, and he starts scratching, very slowly scratching from the curve of my neck to my swelling hips, long red, welting scratches, incessant scratches, faster, deeper. And for every pull of his malignant fist, he shreds his rage against a perfect controlling wife. He pairs a temporary escape from a self-made cage of professional importance. He slashes out his sexual inadequacies and fears. He chisels the cold granite surface of his evil savage heart. Long burning scratches in my unmarried skin, turned to shreds of flesh and bone, severing my heart from my soul, shattering my childhood, slicing my life into long, narrow strips

of insanity. And I scream. I scream so silently that yellow walls shatter, and there's no space to hold him. For an end, breastbone, collarbone, ribcage, shining white against innocent blood, searing crimson heart pounding out agony as it's torn from my chest. With one critical tear, my soul is torn from the body, and then I just turn off. He keeps tearing at my skin, but I can't hurt any longer. The pain is gone. I feel tremendous sadness and defeat, I fail again, he's conquered. That sadness is absolute. There's no will or soul left in me, bits of flesh and blood and bone, but no person behind it. I'm gone. All I see is a distant scene of someone shredding up someone else's limp adolescent body.

I wake, I'm lost in a personal hell, alone in a holocaust of rage, void of nurturing arms to comfort and protect. No one to collect the lost tears, the lost hopes, the lost lies, incest. When you write something like that, are you able to take that particular memory and then encapsulate and set it aside? Can you say I dealt with this? I think, yeah. I think it in some ways makes it more real when it's on black and white paper, and you know, through the reality I can accept then what it is and deal with it and then try to move past it. What about the rest of the family, John?

Something like this can't really be happening in a vacuum, scars, tears, cries. Yeah, every family, again, is different how they interact and the dial and secrecy keep families somehow looking like families when this is going on and afterwards. As the secret, if it does come out, then the denial has to either be faced or pushed down and that does all kinds of things psychologically and emotionally, which is often the case. And the other family members sometimes aren't strong enough to be able to do that? Very often. Was that the case in your family, or so? I think the members of my family really are varied. I have an older brother that's very dear to me and he was so much older than me that for

most of the real violence, sadistic abuse, he was out of the house at college. And I think since he had that distance, he's able to support me now. Because he wasn't in collusion, so to speak. I have an older sister that initially labeled me schizophrenic and would not have anything to do with me. Now I think she's just started dealing with her own stuff and I really question if she has been abused. I have no way of knowing that, but I question that. Then I have another brother, the brother that is closest to me or was at that time, he's 13 months older than I am. He won't deal with me or it at all and basically ignores the issue. And you understand? Yeah, I think I do.

I think it's maybe too close to him and at some level, even though he maybe can't consciously acknowledge it, I think it's just too close. Maybe he knew and was real aware and he just isn't able to deal with it. What about your mother? My mother was a perpetrator, not to the extent of my father, but she was a perpetrator and was well aware of the abuse. She at this point is going to a variety of therapists, hoping that someone will tell her that she has no responsibility in the abuse and that they will kind of forgive her for whatever. If the therapy out there is as varied as John describes, she may find that there is that true? Yeah.

There's lots of therapists out there who are not familiar with these dynamics and it looks like one thing and they think this person just needs forgiveness and healing and going with their life and they'll bestow that and not realize what's going on. My mother's primary concern is that through all of this coming out, she doesn't have control and manipulation of the family as she did before. And so her big concern in therapy is that she's lost her family, not that she participated in abusing me and not that her husband abused me, but that she's lost control of the family. Is that what this is really all about anyway? There are definitely huge control and power issues, but the bottom line is choice. People choose to do these things and the only way they can be healed is going back and facing the choices they made and taking the responsibility.

Are these choices that are made considering what the losses would be if they were to be found out? Partially that and partially perhaps because of their own childhood victimization that they have been trying to act out things they didn't go and seek healing for, they chose to act them out instead. And very complex picture, but the bottom line in any kind of therapeutic program has to be choice. Otherwise we don't control it and we should lock up everybody, otherwise they could do it at any time to anybody. I guess what I'm wondering about is what contingencies must these calculating people set up should they be discovered? They're amazingly enough. Most of them believe that they are so skillful that it doesn't matter if they get found out they'll be able to calm people into believing that they really didn't do it. I've seen people on radio and TV and in the newspaper say, you know, I can't understand

who did this. And I don't know why they're accusing me, you know, I'm the last person in the world that would do something like this, you know, I love these children or whatever. And they've been believed on national TV, you know, local and in many other places. But haven't we reached a point where we will accept what the children have to say? The children really don't make these things. No, we really have it. We like to think we have. But most of these cases, two thirds of all child of these cases still are not known. We've come a long ways. Don't get me wrong. And I'm thrilled about that. But we still have the massive amount of denial of the national child abuse calls at the iceberg. The iceberg, two thirds of it is still unknown that we do not allow it to come out. We do not face it. I'd like to interject here that I feel real strongly that when I was talking earlier about anonymity and people having to take risk that, you know, it's possible when I was a child that someone had some inkling of an idea that something is not right in this family, but nobody took

the risk for my sake to get me out of that mess. And I think that the awareness has to come to a point where people will realize, yeah, if I question this, or if I bring some attention to the fact that something in this household isn't right, there may be risk involved for me, but it doesn't matter because this child is more important than what I might have to go through because I took the chance. Is it because of the legal nature of problems that can arise? Well, you know, if you report suspected child abuse, you're immune from any kind of prosecution or anything, every state has a lot like that. I think a lot more has to do with, as Marcella saying, just people's sense of their own personal risk and getting involved and face and denial, and we all, in the introduction, I wrote the

little button my son showed me, you know, I'm not deaf, I'm just ignoring you. That really sums it up for me, you know, people ignore it, you know, they blink their eyes, they turn their head. It's very painful to face, but that pain is in the child's lives, or children's lives all around us. I think that's for Marcella's book, it shows the hell that a lot of people have gone through or are still going through, and that we as a society can help bring people out of this hell by giving them the opportunity to express what's inside and to be healed. But it's hard for us to hear that. We don't want to think that about our society, or maybe about our neighbors, or maybe even about somebody in our family. Who is the ancient child in the title? I think that's me, and that's a lot of other survivors of being, you know, my emotional development was severely thwarted, and I think I went into my whole healing process as no more than a two-year-old, and having no more of the adjustment skills or the skills

that I needed than a two-year-old would have. At the same time as immature as I was and am, I had been through more than, you know, most of the population will ever have to go through, and that makes me feel like I joke sometimes and say that I'm the oldest 30-year-old that anybody has ever met, because there are times I just feel ancient, just so dragged down from all that I have been through, but at the same time very young and kind of real immature coping skills. And sexual abuse and child abuse and neglect, I've been working in this field for about 12 years, are like a Nazi concentration camp in our own country, they're like the deepest problem that our society still refuses on any kind of grand scale to face, and it's

going on among us right now, and we hear about it and we agree it's a problem, but in that agreement we've somehow made a co-glusive agreement not to go beyond that. That's 7% of the children that we do to survey in Texas don't get any treatment for child sexual abuse. We say it's there, but then we wouldn't think of leaving, you know, victims of broken arms or whatever, not getting things, but child sexual abuse, which has an incredible death-like effect on a child's soul and they're psyche, we allow them to grow up without any kind of help. And so I think that that's something that's really hard for us to comprehend unless we get to know someone like Marcella, and then we usually recoil because the implications of it immediately hit us, how many more people are there around us, one in four women, one in seven boys, and that's just sexual abuse.

So I think in closing what I would like to say is that is our responsibility for each one of us to look around and be sensitive, and maybe in our own life, there's a lot of victims who don't know that they're victims, and that healing will help other people then as Marcella has to be a role model for other people to have the courage to face something that may be very painful and yet healing defies. Survivor Marcella Bryant has written ancient child poetry about incest, published by plain view press in Austin, Texas. John Boyle is executive director of Pebble Project, a child abuse prevention program also in Austin, Texas. The views expressed on this program do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Texas at Austin or this station. Technical producer for Forum, Diane Stubbs, Production Assistant Christine Drawer, I'm your producer and host, Olive Graham.

Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing, Forum Cassettes, Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712, that's Forum Cassettes, Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network. People are aware of abuse, but I think that people need to know or have it on a more

personal level in order to do anything about it and in order to be willing to take the risk that need to be taken to stop it. This week on Forum, insights into childhood sexual abuse.