national child abuse prevention month

Look, the guy who raped me is probably an okay guy.

The babysitter who kissed me when I was five and she wasn't, the way babysitters aren't supposed to kiss you, the way their parents probably don't want them kissing anybody at all, turned out to have serious issues that came to light as an adult many years later and wound up in legal trouble of a kind that, when you hear about it, you wonder how she thought she could get away with it if she were in her right mind. And while the one kind of transgression doesn't seem to have anything to do with the other, the whole fractured picture makes you wonder, well, was she just some kind of ... all around fucked-up? To employ the technical term.

But this guy, is what I'm saying, is probably not a villain. There was actually more than one guy. Separate occasions (he said, as though to safeguard the image of his virtue). But this one guy had been through a lot. Worse than me at least up to that point, and odds are pretty good he was reenacting what had been done to him, and that it had been done to him more than once.

I've talked before about being a victim of childhood sexual abuse, and April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month, and March was National Sexual Assault Awareness Month, so this is when I tend to talk about this. There were three molesters, rapists, assailants, whatever you want to call them, over the course of more than three occasions spread out over my childhood. None of them relatives -- I mention that because "survivors of incest" is a big subset, and not my tribe.

This guy was a minor still and had been through a lot, and he's gone and grown up and hopefully has worked through whatever happened to him, whatever many things happened to him, and hopefully it didn't take him as long as it did me, but if it did he's still had time to get around to it. And if so there's a good chance he's an okay guy. You get a pretty long timeline to figure shit out if you stay out of traffic.

So there's that.

Whatever happened to those individuals after they left those events they created, though, those events still had their effect on me. Those events resulted in my post-traumatic stress, contributing to claustrophobia, anxiety, exaggerated startle response, nightmares, hearing voices and seeing things, psychotic breaks, this whole thing where I imagined an older version of myself to give me advice to survive and then the older version of myself turned into a constant source of criticism instead of a wacky turn of events where he turns into a 5th-dimensional Mxyzpltk instead, panic and anxiety attacks, not letting anyone cut my hair for fucking years because how the fuck can I let a stranger stand that close to me by my fucking neck with fucking sharp objects, a nervous breakdown, problems with affect regulation and self-criticism, and the list goes on, a list thankfully growing ever shorter thanks to therapy -- but a list, nonetheless, oh what a list. Those effects are not mitigated by anything that happened to those people later in life or by my ability to understand that their actions came from somewhere -- that they were not random, that they became people able to act that way (or unable to act any other way) because of events in their own lives or chemicals in their own brains, forces burning and churning and acidulating as powerful an effect on them (if not moreso) as these events have on me.

The third one, the one I haven't actually mentioned, the one who did the most, I don't know anything mitigating about him. I don't have any context to excuse anything. All I know is what's human, which is that mostly life isn't a thriller novel and mostly nobody's just born rotten and stunkout, which is that mostly the bad that's done by us, it started somewhere. Some people do more bad than the bad that's been done to them, don't get me wrong, and I'm not talking about excuses or rationales or justifications, I'm talking about mechanisms, I'm talking about the drinky bird that pecks the mousetrap that snaps broke whatever last glass gasp inside you had to break before you could do what you done. All I know is that bad doesn't just rain down on you from nowhere and it doesn't just happen in a day.

So what I'm saying is I can know, without knowing what, without knowing why, I can know there was something, I can know there was a wrong somehow, there was a break somewhere, a crack somewhere, I can know that because people aren't supposed to do that and he did, that something happened to him, whether it was done to him from without or within, to make him do it.

I can understand this about all of them, and my understanding does not lift the yoke off my neck.

Can I separate the rape from the rapist?

Woody Allen's adopted daughter Dylan Farrow has for over 20 years claimed that he molested her when she was 7; police failed to pursue a case due to lack of physical evidence and a "rehearsed quality" to Dylan's statements. Comedians like Johnny Carson had been making jokes about Woody's interest in underage girls since at least Manhattan, and of course he married his stepdaughter.

Purple Rose of Cairo is one of my all-time favorite movies. Annie Hall, What's Up Tiger Lily, Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex, Midnight in Paris, and yes, Manhattan -- all genius movies.

Victor Salva was convicted of filming himself having sex with one of the 12 year old actors in his early feature Clownhouse before going on to make the Jeepers Creepers movies and the Disney magic albino movie Powder. It's worth pointing out -- in the context of all of this it has to be pointed out -- that Powder has a strong pedophile subtext that's lost on children and most parents but clear to people familiar with what to look for.

I loved Jeepers Creepers.

Bill Cosby ...

I don't even need to summarize that one, and of course grew up on Fat Albert and the Cosby Show.

Can you separate the art from the artist?

Is it morally better to not watch Woody Allen's new Amazon show when it comes out? I don't know. I do know that I have decided that I am not going to be comfortable watching it. I have not made this decision for you, which is to say, I have not decided that you are a lesser person if you watch it. I have decided what I am comfortable with.

Is it better to take the Cosby Show off the air? I Spy? Fat Albert? I don't know that either.

Is the Victor Salva part of the conversation affected by the fact that, unlike Cosby and Allen, he was arrested, convicted, and served his time?

Are we talking about crimes that simply say something about who you are on a deeper level than fraud or theft or drug use or drunk and disorderly? Not the "we" of a law-making society -- that is, it wouldn't be right to define laws in such a way -- but the "we" of a consumer society, the "we" of many me's and you's who can decide which vendors and entertainers deserve our dollars, and maybe the ones who might use those dollars to buy child porn or roofies are less deserving.

Is the first half of this entry related to the second?

I don't really know that either.

I know that the second conversation happens a lot. Cosby more often than Woody, though Woody should come up more often. Salva not as often -- he's obviously not a big name, though he pops up in the news every so often (he's in it at the moment).

Does it seem strange to want to find the good, the explicable, the human or humane or survivable about my own abusers -- to want to separate the rape from the rapist -- while resisting the temptation to separate the art from the artists when it comes to these other assaults that don't personally impact me? The thing is, those other assaults are not mine to contextualize or humanize. I am not the one bearing that weight.

Listen. I wrote this quickly, trying to articulate a stream of thought. I understand that this may not be as coherent an entry on this topic as I've had in the past. These topics feel connected to me -- public and private shaming and forgiveness, public and private personas.

The reason I talk about this every year is because the most important thing to me when it comes to sexual abuse is to fight the stigma. Abuse goes unreported because of the stigma that attaches to the victim -- child or otherwise. Victims of abuse feel ashamed, guilty, sure that they brought it on themselves, that something must be wrong with them for it to happen to them -- that somehow the bad that has been done to them is just the bad that was inside them all along, made manifest through the universe's sense of justice, the bad that they deserved -- there are many child sexual abuse analogues to the "she must have been asking for it" myth of adult rape. They feel guilty about the consequences they may be "responsible" for: the stress they cause their parents and the people they report it to, the fuss, the circus, the consequences to the abuser. They don't want to be a "tattletale," a "troublemaker." They don't want to draw attention to themselves -- especially now, after this, oh especially after this, believe me.

That's why I need to talk about it, why we need to talk about it. The stigma allows it to continue. Not talking about it punishes the victims and protects the abusers. It creates a culture in which abusers thrive. That culture needs to end.

The most important thing is to remain aware of child abuse, sexual and otherwise, and support important causes like:

The National Alliance on Mental Illness

and

RAINN