I possess you, therefore I screw you

Sexual abuse of children is rarely about sex, it's about power. When I remembered my own abuse, I couldn’t comprehend that it really happened to me. The more I read about other childhood sexual abuse survivors, the more similarities I found, from amnesia to confusion to questions – why? The answer is always the same – because of power. Daughters in our society belong to fathers, fathers possess us, and the ultimate manifestation of their power over us is incest. This is the assertion of their masculinity. Why children? Because they are easy prey. Like pets. They don’t protest, they don’t talk about it, they continue to love their perpetrator, they are easy to convince, and they usually comply with anything. They have no choice – the parent is also their caregiver. Adult partners in the life of the perpetrator have a choice – to protest, to quit the relationship, to scream - but not the kids.

So how does this work? In the case of my father it worked like this: he was in pain – from his own childhood traumas. The pain was so intense, that it needed to be released. The only way to release the pain was to re-experience it, to process it, and to let it go. If the perpetrator understands that he has it. He typically thinks he doesn’t, as my father thought as well. His pain was so intense and so old, it has been blocked for so long, he got used to being numb, it was his way of life. Yet it ate him from inside out. What was maddening to him was that he had no idea where the urge was coming from. But when it came, there was no stopping him. He had to re-experience it to let it go. How? To see the pain on the face of another. To inflict pain and feel power over another being – a chld. Why? Because most of our pain comes from our childhood traumas, and it is the most intense. Whose face did he want to see the pain on? Mine.

He started from the very beginning. One of my earliest memories point to me being shaken upside down - it is just the feeling that I remember, as I was an infant, but it was also the pain in the right hip, the one I am still dealing with today. Then there is a mystery of my blood transfusion - when I was 1 - when he gave me almost all new blood - as I was dying from dystrophia. What, they didn't feed me? Nobody tells me why, they all say I wasn't eating anything, so I was to blame. He continued when I started walking, so I must have been 1 and a half or older. He trained me, mom said he loved "training me" - to not touch his things. One of them was his typewriter (he wrote his stories on it). He'd wait until I walk over to touch it (I was fascinated with it), then slap me on my hands, hard. I cried. Mom said, the cycle would repeat endlessly. He was furious that I was so stubborn, I would not get his technique. Around this age I left with my mom to go to Russia (he stayed in Germany - we were there together for 6 months as he was on a writing assignment), and I have not seen him until he returned, by that time I was 4 or 5 - my parents divorced when I was 4 and a half. Well, when I was 5 is the first time that he raped me. From then on, he would turn his anger towards me - to punish my mom. But, also, to release his own pain - he lived with his mother till she died, he was 65 - and she still cooked his meals and washed his socks, and wouldn't let him bring a woman home. He is now trying to create a life for himself, for the first time, with the woman number 4 - good luck, daddy. But you don't possess me anymore. I wonder what your own mother did to you to screw you up like that, and I am sorry that it happened to you. But it was not my job to fix it for you, and that's why I have denounced you as my father - you never were, really. 

Back to perpetrators and their need to assert themselves - this need is universal as long as we have male domination in our society, as long as males have the power of possessing females. When we change that, when we will have equal rights, when women and children will be viewed as valuable citizens, the same way as men, then we won't have incest anymore. Then it will be an exception rather than common place. Until then - learn the patterns to recognize it, to help prevent it, and speak up if it happened to you - together, we have the power to change this.