Why Survivors of Sexual Abuse Don’t Speak Up and Why We Must

I’ve just set off the metal detector at the Barajas Airport in Madrid, Spain, despite the fact that the one and only piece of metal I am wearing is a single earring the size of a pinhead. And I am only wearing it because it’s still a relatively new piercing, and if I remove it, as I have done every other piece of jewelry that I was wearing before I walked through the metal detector, in a desperate and obviously futile attempt to not face the possibility of being patted down, of having one more damn pair of hands on me that I have not chosen, that hole in my ear might close up. And it must remain open, because that piercing, along with the one beside it, and half of my tattoos, are part of the story no one wants to tell and too many are forced to: how to reclaim your body as your own.


Do you know what it’s like to have no choice over who puts their hands on you or in you?


I do.


Do you know what it’s like to survive a blaze that razed your house to the ground, that left you wandering, desperately searching for a place that you could again call home — a beautiful, safe, and happy home?


I do.


Do you know why so many survivors of blazes don’t speak?


I do. It’s because they are told there was no fire.


If not for the cruelty and cowardice of this response, if not for the wounds such a response engenders, it might be almost laughable. It is too absurd to ever be taken seriously.


Imagine this. You are a burn victim emerging from a house engulfed in flames. Flesh is peeling from your body. Hair is singed to its roots. Soot covers everything, including your eyes, and you can no longer see clearly: that beauty still exists; that it thrives before you and is rooted within you. For some reason that defies reason, you are filled with shame for an act of destruction which you did not commit or cause or deserve. You are in so much pain that you cannot speak; words don’t exist to describe this. But you are brave and so you try. You are not even sure that help exists, because how could anyone ever recover from this. Nevertheless, you speak. You ask for help. You say, “I was burned in a fire.”


In response, you are not offered help. You are not even offered kindness or empathy or comprehension. The smoke is still curling, sparks singeing their way out of your pores, when you are told, “What fire? There was no fire.” Then, after you have been told this, you are told it again. And again. And again.

And thus it begins. The insanity of division. This separation of self. Your heart begins to question everything it feels, including its right to its own pain. Your mind is caught between what it knows occurred and a brutal, revisionist version. It doubts everything, nothing is solid ground, because if it was wrong about something as tremendous as abuse, it must be wrong about everything else as well. You try to flee the ugly remains that you see; you loathe the gift of the body that was entrusted to you at birth; that miracle that gives you the experience of stars and music; of grains of sand between your toes and tangible love within your arms. You seek out the shadows. Any place to not be seen, because you are certain that others see in you what you see in yourself. Your trust in others is tainted, tarnished, soon worn so thin that it cracks, that holes are everywhere; it can hold nothing and no one inside it. Your trust in yourself, in your gut, in that great center of power, a womb forever growing and bearing feet meant to guide you left or right, away from danger but even more, even more, towards beauty and love and magic, might as well be barren. Those feet point left, and you go right, and then you beat yourself up mercilessly for not following them. Roaring pain explodes within you, and joy, which is still there, is buried in the darkest corners of your soul, certain that it will never find its way back to life again. On the darkest days, on the days when the inevitable happens and you sink into that deep, black hole where too much and too many are lost, your ears cannot accept the tender words said to you, and your heart refuses the love given to you: the love from others which is a precursor to your own love. Your spirit is separated from its song, which is now shrouded in silence. Silence becomes a way of life. And then a way of death.


Of all the things you must never be, silent is one of them. Silence can never help you take back your strength and power. Silence can never heal the division inside you. If one person is silent, no one knows what happened to that single being. But if everyone is silent, no one knows that others — many others — have experienced the same thing. We never find out how un-alone we are. We never come together to form the army that must be formed if we are to wrest choice back from those who have taken it.


I was 15 when an entire month of bleeding, a period without end, landed me in the office of a “specialist,” “one of the best doctors in the field”. I arrived there through the recommendation of a trusted family physician. As such, my family trusted this “specialist” I wound up seeing. And did I ever see him: at first every other week and then once a month for three and a half years. Each visit entailed a complete gynecological exam. After a year or so of these visits, when I asked him if a complete gynecological exam, every single month, was truly necessary to regulate my periods, he yelled at me. I had no right to question his authority. Without an exam, he couldn’t determine if the dosage of my medicine needed to be changed. (97% of the time it never was.) Yes, he could give me birth control pills to regulate my periods, as other doctors did, but that was a quick fix. It would never get me better permanently. The moment I went off birth control, I’d start bleeding uncontrollably again. He didn’t want that to happen. He wanted me better, permanently.


Some words stay with you forever, and in the course of his 45-minute reprimand, these words exited his mouth. I quote, “It’s not about making you bleed. I can make you bleed anytime I want.”


Four weeks later I was back in his office for another exam. I could not even attempt to put out one fire before the next one started. And yet, truly, what was there to put out? After all, he had told me in no uncertain terms: there was no fire. There was blood, to be sure. But there was no fire.


The capacity of the human mind to justify the unjustifiable is astounding. There exist war crimes, but war itself is not a crime. When an adult hits an adult, it’s assault. When an adult hits a child, it’s discipline. When a security guard at an airport grabs your breasts and puts her hand between your legs, it’s OK, because she’s a woman, and she’s wearing gloves, and it’s for our protection, as we have been told numerous times over. — Which must be true, of course, because of the vast number of women who sneak knives which they’ve stashed in their bras onto planes and shoot-up airports with guns that they’ve shoved halfway into their vaginas. “It’s the rules,” “It’s the policy,” and “It’s the law” are three more spectacular ways to justify the unjustifiable.


The doctor I saw always wore a glove, and a female nurse was always present. I began to repeat to myself, “There is no fire. There is no fire.” Meanwhile, self-love and self-trust burned to a crisp, then crumbled to dust. There was nothing left but ashes.


After three and a half years of these visits, this doctor retired due to health problems. (He was kind enough to examine me one more time before he told me he was retiring.) He said I still wasn’t better, needed to continue my “treatment”, and recommended a doctor to me. I didn’t take his recommendation. I found another doctor, told her nothing about my monthly exams with the previous doctor, only about the problems I’d had three and a half years ago and the medicine I was still taking. She told me to stop taking the medicine I was on. I did. And what a staggering surprise: I was fine. I shudder to think how many more years those visits would have gone on if he had not retired. How long it would have taken me to get back enough trust in myself to walk out the door and never return.


Because of what the “specialist” I saw had told me, I was terrified to go on birth control, certain that when I decided to go off it, I would be a bloody mess. Fear of pregnancy eventually outweighed fear of blood. When I did stop taking birth control after four years on it, I was stunned one more time to find: nothing happened. My periods were regular. Even more regular than with the medicine he had put me on. I was not a bloody mess. But I was still searching for a way to rebuild, for a way home, for a way back to the love I had once had for myself.


It was almost 20 years later that I told another person about those exams. She was a new family physician, and in the course of giving her my medical history, which included my menstrual cycles, I told her about those visits. By chance, by luck, by some great divine gift that came 20 years late, but at least it came, her specialty was the exact type of problem I had had with my periods when I was younger.


Some words stay with you forever, and I will never, ever forget the ones she uttered when I finished telling her about my exams: “That motherfucker.” Those two words, that acknowledgment, that: yes you have been burned, marked the beginning of the end of the division within. Little by little, many things, but not all, that had been slain were brought back to life. Most importantly, self-love and trust in my heart, mind, and gut returned.

The effects of sexual abuse are vast. They creep into all areas of your life. They are insidious and ruthless in their destruction. And it’s only looking back that you can see, after the soot has finally been cleared from your eyes, not only the tremendous damage that was done, but where and how the fire began and who set it. It is only in wholeness that you comprehend how divided you were, and why it was the inevitable consequence of a society’s reprehensible teachings that the last person who should have dominion over your own body is you.


While I’m awaiting my fate at the airport in Madrid, the same fate that faced me in Boston before I left the U.S., both sides of the Atlantic disturbing reflections of the same reality, panic sets in: will one more person have agency over my own body? I pray to the god of my childhood for help, a giant man in the sky in whom I no longer believe, but to whom, out of force of habit, I pray to in situations when I feel like I have no choice. In the end, that giant man in the sky was nothing more than an enormous projection of the tiny men on earth, the men who have taken choice from me and so many others; men seeking the greatness that they do not have and will never know; the greatness that comes only from enormous hearts but not enormous abuses of power.


I am not patted down at the airport. I’m allowed to leave after my belongings are thoroughly searched. Instead, the woman in front of me, in her sixties, is patted down. Her breasts are squeezed and the security guard runs her hands between her legs. The fact that the guard is a woman does not make it OK. The fact that she’s wearing gloves does not make it OK. The fact that it’s legal does not make it OK. And for some of us, this is not only not OK; it’s also a reminder of other hands which we were not allowed to say no to.


However many women have come forward to speak about the sexual harassment and abuse they have suffered, the rapes they have survived, however many men are named as assailants, are the tip of an iceberg the size of a staggering portion of the globe. I know of very few women who have not been the victim of at least one act of destruction, a survivor of at least one blaze. The stories other women have told me astound me, even though, by now, a part of me is astounded that I am still astounded. The majority of these abuses were not assaults by strangers in the street. Hatemongers capitalize on people’s fear of the unknown in order to rise to power. Yet it is the known that, much more often, does us harm. The trusted Larry Nassers of the world are many, and what a vile act to claim the title of healer when you are a maker of wounds.


A former colleague was masturbated by her gynecologist with an instrument he was supposedly using as part of his exam. An acquaintance was asked by a family physician to describe, in great detail, all of the sexual positions she’s ever been in and how each one felt. One friend’s daughter had her nipples squeezed by her pediatrician after which he informed her that her breasts were beginning to grow. Another friend’s daughter was asked by her gynecologist to show him how she performed her breast exams. Twenty-four years old, shy, naked on a table, on the lesser side of the imbalance of power that exists too often in doctors’ offices, she performed the self-exam while he watched her, smiling. A female nurse was present in the examining room the whole time.


It is horrific to speak of horrific things. It is also exhausting. It drains the mind of faith in goodness and the heart of hope. But it is also essential to speak of horrific things so that they will not continue to burn from within, and so that other fires can be prevented.


And so I am praying again. Not to a giant man in the sky. But neither to a goddess of the earth, holy mother who gave birth to all, for she is still weeping, still stunned that so many of the sons that she has borne have attacked the sisters who shared her womb with them. I’m praying instead to the women who’ve come before, to the dead, who are never truly dead, because scars get passed down, but so does courage. I’m praying to my great-grandmother who ran away from home at age 18 so she would not have to marry the 50-year-old man to whom she was promised. I’m praying to my grandmother who traded “casualty of war” for “survivor” after her gang-rape. I’m praying to them to link arms with their sisters, and their brothers who know better, to rally the troops, because the fight has barely begun and love needs to get louder to combat all the hate being spewed. Because the educators, who are tired of teaching the same damn thing again and again, to so many who are apparently unable to learn, need strength to keep teaching. Because justice isn’t served twenty or ten or five years later, no matter what the courts say. Because prevention of abuse via the instruction of what should be obvious isn’t a daily occurrence. Because the wounded can never be treated if they are treated as though their wounds do not exist. Because the phoenix isn’t the only creature that can rise from the ashes. Because it is not through silence that she rises but speech. And it is not in silence that she will soar but in song.