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Forum: Victims and Survivors Corner
Thread (Discussion): what do you do?
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Message 169171 (In Reply to Message 169139)
helping victims
Posted by deadmomwalking
on Dec 10, 2005 11:24 PM | Also by deadmomwalking
| Gender: Female,
Age Bracket: 50 - 59,
State: N/A,
Country: Canada |
For victims and their families I think your own mental and emotional wellbeing comes first. You can't really be objective enough to help others when you are living in a confused nightmare. You need to be healthy yourself.
I have had a lot of contact with victims of sexual assault and abuse. Some of these people I have known for a long time and never knew until my daughter's disclosure what had happened to them. I hope, at the very least, that I've given them a sympathetic ear. Sometimes I am surprised at how often they have lived with this secret for years, telling perhaps only one or two other people and how they still have very self-defeating and self-blaming attitudes about what happened, not to mention grief. They virtually all tear up or cry when they talk about it and sometimes it happened 30 years ago. It is as if a part of them stopped growing at 8 or 12 or 14 or whenever the abuse happened and there is a part of them that is still this child, standing still, afraid to move forward. At this stage I don't know if I have enough distance to be able to give anyone advice but what I can do that doesn't cause any harm, I hope, is listen and emphasize the person's strengths and good qualities. Most of these women have self-esteem issues.
Eventually I would like to do some advocacy but I am not sure what form it would take. There are a lot of issues. To me an important one that really isn't handled well is the emotional and mental well-being of victims. So often extremely traumatized victims are being "used" once again by either police or therapists or political feminists with their own agenda. Not that those people don't mean well - but I don't think they really understand how seriously damaged some victims are and how they need time and peace to heal before anything else happens. Many victims are in no state to be a warrior in their particular cause. When you are plunked into the criminal justice system, unlike perps who have a lawyer to look after their interests, victims don't typically have an advocate. Law enforcement's job is the protection of society not the best interests of the victim. I will never forget how we were to have a meeting in the hospital with psychiatrists, social workers and nurses over developing a plan for my daughter's treatment (my daughter was suicidal and severely dissociative at this time) and the police came in uninvited and took over the meeting, and all of a sudden, it wasn't about my daughter anymore, it was about using her to get justice. Then once they are finished with you it is like, "OK, well, sorry that didn't work out. See ya."
In broader terms, I can't speak about the US, but here in Canada mental health treatment is a disgrace. So many mentally ill people are living on the street or in shelters. There are virtually NO long-term facilities except for geriatrics or the criminally insane so people who are very ill are either living on the street or with their ill-equipped families, who get virtually no support. When my daughter was released from the hospital in a still suicidal and psychotic state and refused to come home she was placed in a women's shelter. That was the best they could do for a teenage girl suffering from PTSD, who was cutting and suicidal. This is what we do for victims of sexual abuse and trauma who don't get better enough quick enough. She was exposed to more danger in the women's shelter than if she had been living in the home of the man who molested her! And there was nothing we,as her parents could do about it - short of kidnapping her. Because she was so emotionally fragile we were afraid to do anything. It was like watching someone standing on the ledge of a high-rise building. You want to reach out and grab them but you are afraid if you do they will jump. There are not enough resources for treating mental illness and it sometimes seems to me psychiatrists are not much better than witch doctors - in fact, I think my daughter might have been better off with an understanding and compassionate priest/pastor.
Most of my efforts have been directed at trying, by whatever means - some probably not that smart, to save my daughter's life and help her get her health back. I think for victims' families sometimes survival as a family comes first. There were many times that it seemed hopeless - that I would never get her back. My own therapist told me to cut her loose - that my involvement with her was destroying me and hurting my family. BUT - my daughter is doing a lot better finally. She still struggles with anxiety and depression and an eating disorder. She has a lot of physical health problems, some of which she will always have. But she is back. She is my daughter again. I look at her and see, once again, the girl I knew. She is not cutting or taking overdoses or hallucinating or living in a parallel universe. She remembers that she has a family who, whatever their foibles, love her. She is sane. She says the past two years (since her disclosure) have been unreal - like she was caught in someone else's nightmare. The other day she said crying "Mom, if I ever get like that again, don't leave me, don't give up on me no matter what I tell you. Because, in spite of what I said so many times, when I am myself, I don't want to die." So I am very glad I hung in there in spite of what many people told me to do.
Beyond my own family, I am taking part in planning a mental health advocacy group in my church. We are just in the planning stages now.
I think education is important and I tell our story - more to strangers than people that know us, so that people will be more cautious. I think changing attitudes is important. So I take people to task when they make jokes about rape or child abuse. I think education of potential perpetrators is as or more important than education of potential victims. As was evident from the situation you described in another post, anti, we can teach kids all these "skills" for avoiding potential abuse, but in the end, if an adult wants to molest a child the child is still very vulnerable. A friend of mine had a brother who, at 11, was a black belt in karate. He felt pretty good about it and the family were proud of his skill. He went to a competition out of town and competed well against his own age group, but what he found out, to his distress, was that almost any adult competing with minimal skills could take him out. We should not be expecting children to defend themselves against adults and we are pretending to ourselves if we think that they can.
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Message 169139
what do you do to help?
Posted by anti
on Dec 10, 2005 06:53 PM | Also by anti
| Gender: N/A,
Age Bracket: N/A,
State: N/A,
Country: United States |
Thread
169139, anti, Dec 10, 2005 06:53 PM [what do you do to help?]
169171, deadmomwalking, Dec 10, 2005 11:24 PM [helping victims]
169688, anti, Dec 17, 2005 08:24 PM [to deadmomwalking..]
169179, momhelpingbyherself, Dec 11, 2005 01:04 AM [anti]
169689, anti, Dec 17, 2005 08:26 PM [thank you..]
169229, steve, Dec 11, 2005 06:16 PM
169248, momhelpingbyherself, Dec 11, 2005 08:05 PM [steve]
169690, anti, Dec 17, 2005 08:27 PM [noSteve...]
170071, steve, Dec 27, 2005 05:05 PM
170073, anti, Dec 27, 2005 05:33 PM [To Steve,]
170077, dp1, Dec 27, 2005 07:29 PM
170084, anti, Dec 28, 2005 03:27 AM [dp, cool....]
170105, momhelpingbyherself, Dec 28, 2005 02:17 PM [dp1]
169250, Quest, Dec 11, 2005 08:16 PM [i don't do enough]
169270, momhelpingbyherself, Dec 12, 2005 02:47 AM [quest]
169349, Quest, Dec 13, 2005 03:10 AM
169691, anti, Dec 17, 2005 08:28 PM [I do comend you..]
169264, Valerie, Dec 11, 2005 11:05 PM
169266, PVulcan, Dec 11, 2005 11:49 PM
169285, rebel51, Dec 12, 2005 01:23 PM
170130, anti, Dec 28, 2005 07:49 PM [listening...]
170175, rebel51, Dec 29, 2005 01:28 PM
170193, Valerie, Dec 29, 2005 02:42 PM
170210, anti, Dec 29, 2005 04:56 PM [val...]
169291, Pending Further Review
169692, anti, Dec 17, 2005 08:30 PM [val, then you are...]
170067, Valerie, Dec 27, 2005 02:17 PM
170072, dp1, Dec 27, 2005 05:17 PM
170076, anti, Dec 27, 2005 05:54 PM [no dp, sorry..]
170074, anti, Dec 27, 2005 05:35 PM [Val, yes]
170106, momhelpingbyherself, Dec 28, 2005 02:23 PM [a serious question]
170127, anti, Dec 28, 2005 06:35 PM [never...]
170117, Valerie, Dec 28, 2005 05:01 PM
170126, anti, Dec 28, 2005 06:34 PM [Val...]
170133, momhelpingbyherself, Dec 28, 2005 09:02 PM [valerie]
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