Child Sexual and Physical Abuse: “Safe People Aren’t Always Safe”
By Saloni Bhugra
(Other than the name of the behaviourist, no real names are used to protect the identity of the victim/survivor and the alleged abusers for legal and safety purposes)
It was winter of 2007 and Tanisha, six at the time, walked in the basement of her grandparents’ Toronto house after dinner — her family was living with them at the time. She wore the furry pajamas that her mother, Angelina bought for her for Christmas and walked into the washroom to clean up for bed. “I am so happy, I’m brushing my teeth, I am so happy, I am in my pajamas, I am so happy, I will sleep in my bed, I am so full, I am so happy” Tanisha sang as she brushed her teeth. The elders were awake and sitting in the dining hall upstairs, and her three siblings were asleep in the other rooms of the basement. Tanisha laid in her bed and thought how nice Christmas and the new year will be, and she fell asleep.
Not more than hour later she woke up to realize she was being raped. “I felt something, I woke up and saw my uncle down there. He quickly got out of bed — my pants were off.” Once her uncle, Raul saw her awake, he left the room and went upstairs. Tanisha stayed in bed for a couple of minutes and walked upstairs too. Raul told her grandmother that his throat felt weird so he needed some chocolate milk. Tanisha’s immature brain told her “his tongue feels weird because he did something bad to me.”
They drank the milk and walked back to their rooms. As Tanisha wrapped herself in the blanket quietly, Raul entered her room and asked her to quietly go to sleep and to not talk about it with anyone.
A few months passed by and Tanisha was not sure if her experience was normal. She had always heard sexual jokes from the adults in the family; “I didn’t know what was wrong about it, it seemed like our everyday life, that was how family was supposed to be,” she said
Leila Clemente, a behaviourist for over 17 years, has worked with adults, adolescents and children, and worked closely with the police and Children’s Aid. She explains how trauma caused at different ages by certain people can lead to irrational fear. “I say irrational because in various situations the third person finds it irrational, but for the victim it is valid (rational). There is no trust, they are scared because they are exposed to danger.”
Tanisha started having irrational sexual fears after the event. She remembered feeling being watched in the shower by her uncle and his friends and thinking that there were cameras hidden. Now, as she recalls it, she finds herself in an awkward position, as if there is something wrong with her.
At the age of eight, her father told her to not be a “drive-thru” and that men don’t commit to women who become a “drive-thru” — “a metaphor for a girl who sleeps with a lot of men.” Tanisha was used to their language and sexual jokes, “but when they said things like ‘don’t be pregnant,’ I always knew they aren’t the parents who will get me out of a bad situation’” she said. Her worst childhood memory is staying home. She would have to wake up and clean the dishes, clean the house, make all the beds, cook for her siblings, and whatever her father wanted her to do. One time, she was alone, and her father asked her to move a double bed outside of the room to make room for a new one. “It was too heavy for me,” she said. “How was I going to move it?”
He saw her failing to move the bed and hit her — he hit her on the corner of the bed, made her stand against a corner of the room with her hands in the air. If she moved, he would hit her.
“He used to ask me to smile, to laugh, after he hit me,” she said. “It had to be a full smile with teeth showing, if you don’t listen, you get beaten up.”
The eight-year-old had an obsession for the Twilight books, and Angelina bought her one as a gift. She wanted to read the book, but Angelina asked her to clean the rooms first, prompting an annoyed eye roll from her daughter. Victor, her father, saw it and swiftly moved towards her in the room with the twilight book in his hand and ripped it apart by hitting her in the face with it. She fell beside the bed, and he kicked her and punched her. “My mama was standing there, she asked him why he was hitting me but did not help me,” Tanisha said.
This went on until Tanisha was 13, when her parents got divorced. Now she was left with only one abusive parent, her mother.
She woke up demotivated, attended school, did household chores, went to bed crying, and kept to herself as much as possible.
If Angelina found her upset, the mother would order her to “suck it up and deal with it.”
Just as her innocent brain was protecting her by repressing the act in the memory, she tried to behave like everything was fine. But she wouldn’t be allowed safety and happiness. One day, when everything was going just smooth, she found a soft mattress in Raul’s bedroom and started jumping and playing on it. In the act, she accidentally tore the poster on the wall above the mattress and got everyone mad at her.
The scared little girl only felt embarrassed and ashamed for doing “something really, really bad” Tanisha said. Angelina grabbed her chanklas (slippers in Spanish) and beat Tanisha, slapping and kicking her until she was really hurt and crying loud. Tanisha was grabbed and taken in front of the family members. “She is crying now, she is hurt, are you guys happy now? Is everyone happy?” Angelina asked rhetorically.
Even though there is no statutory period to report rape or any kind of abuse in Canada, 83 per cent of sexual and physical abuse cases go unreported, according to the 2014 General Social Survey Canada. Statistics Canada reveal that one in 10 Canadians had witnessed physical abuse against a parent or guardian before the age of 15, 70 per cent of these victims have also witnessed physical/sexual assault. A lot of times these parents do not report these cases because they don’t want to be perceived as the parents who allowed this to happen. Clemente said we need to accept the fact that perceived safe people aren’t always safe. “Part of raising happy and healthy humans is to teach them to trust people,” she said. The officer said “unfortunately, these individuals, who are subjected to the decision of the abusers, will be heavily traumatized. They have to live and grow up with the abuser and that will affect them in long term.” The officer said they rely heavily on people children disclose the information to, like teachers or friends, but only a few of these cases are reported and only those are helped. “All others are left to suffer for years,” he said.
It was the summer of 2015, Tanisha, 15 at the time, wore her school sweatshirt and walked down the stairs, listening to Tupac’s songs, to say bye to her mother before she left for school. She spends over an hour before she goes to bed every night to do her neatly, so that she doesn’t have to worry about her long hair in the morning. She wore her eyelashes and one of her favourite sneakers. She describes her style as 80s streetstyle. Her mother, Angelina, walked towards her and asked her to open her sweatshirt to see what she was wearing underneath. Tanisha knew what it was, she was still scared enough to start sweating.
Angelina ordered Tanisha that she shall wear more clothes underneath and not show off her body to men at school: “don’t be a whore.” Tanisha spent her time away from her classmates trying to disconnect herself from what had happened in the morning. As she walked back home, she checked the mail before seeing her mother and aunt, both of whom waited for her. Angelina was smoking outside and saw Tanisha checking the mail box, “did you order a pregnancy test?” Angelina asked. Tanisha said she always checks the mailbox, “I am not pregnant and I am not looking for anything specific, stop it.” Angelina yelled “tell me what you’re looking for then?”
Tanisha fled inside to avoid the scene outdoors, Angelina followed her. Angelina told the aunt to “take care” of her niece. “You might want to know your niece is a whore, she sleeps with her boyfriend and let me show you what she is wearing,” Angelina said. Then she asked Tanisha to take her clothes off in front of her aunt who couldn’t speak a word as she processed the situation.
Tanisha tried to speak in her trembling voice. Her aunt was terrified, she did not know her niece was going through all of this and couldn’t believe the way Angelina treated her. Tanisha’s eyes were full of fear and tears as she finally found the opportunity to speak. Angelina kept yelling at her, “tell me? What is your problem? What is wrong? What is wrong?” Tanisha found the courage to speak, “he…,” Angelina wanted her to just say it, even though she knew what she is going to say, it seemed as if she yelled just to intimidate her to shut her down.
The officer said victims are more likely to completely shut down or lie about details if they are forced to talk about traumatic events.
“He did it to me, … he touched me.” This was the first time in about ten years that Tanisha disclosed the sexual abuse that occurred when she was six years old. After a few more minutes of crying and listening to her mother yelling at her, she sat alone in the hall of their Toronto house alone. She cried and cried for hours. No one asked her more questions, so she couldn’t even say who “he” was. She thinks her mother perceived the abuser as her father, Victor, even though it was her uncle, Raul.
“It went for hours and hours,” Tanisha said. “I felt so helpless all this while, like someone places you in a box and you scream for help, you’re in immense pain, no one can hear you. All these years I was in the box, and even though they could hear a little bit, I remain in this box.”
In Canada, child sexual abuse is considered to be reported under sexual abuse cases before the victim is 18; for physical abuse, it is under 16. The officer said parents who do not report such incidents might have been victims in their childhood, so it is so normalized that they don’t know it is not okay to do something like this. It is not an acceptable method for disciplining a child.
When a child discloses sexual abuse to their physically abusive parents, the parent often realizes that the child did not disclose it in the first place due to the physical abuse, and they will not report it because they feel equally guilty. “We want them to still call us and tell us what they did and what has happened. Sometimes they don’t know any better ways to discipline and they can tell us they made a mistake, but reporting sexual abuse is important,” officer said.
“Until a couple years ago, I didn’t know it wasn’t my fault,” Tanisha said. “I was told it’s too late to cry about it, so I felt like ‘why am I crying now, what’s wrong with me’.”
Clemente urges parents to not just listen but believe what their child says.
“The danger of your child falsely accusing someone and that person deemed guilty is far less than an actual victim’s trust being broken forever,” she said.
On studying the complicated situation that Tanisha is in, the officer said it is hard to comprehend how tricky it is.
“We can still lay charges, the abuse happened, it is tricky as people her age just want to get done with the situation,” he said. “There is constant emotional abuse going on and she would not want to talk about it or risk anything to go through it again.”
According to Clemente, living in a house where you were abused is a devaluation of self. When a person reports or discloses the abuse years later, opposed to a child who was subjected to reported, it is on the lines of recalling and restating the situation, to realize it wasn’t their fault. When everyone around you keeps telling you “it’s nothing”, you question yourself. Usually, when Tanisha is questioned about her experience she says “it is in my head, I remember it, it must’ve happened.”
“These victims are allowed to distrust themselves at a very young age, they are divorced from the ability to decide the right and wrong and when to act,” Clemente said. When a victim like that spends their time at home it is triggering. It isn’t a safe space and it feeds fear and trauma, and most importantly they are left open to further abuse. “Living with such people in a place you call home, is dehumanizing, the rights and bodily autonomy of this person are just considered secondary,” she said.
Angelina usually tries to counter Tanisha’s experience with her own childhood sexual abuse, saying “I was raped multiple times by my father, he used to beat me because I looked like my mother and he hated her. This girl hasn’t seen anything that I did and she is breaking down.”
The officer believes reasonable force to discipline a child can be used and that multiple factors are considered to determine if charges shall be laid. The police try to communicate with the family and try to make the situation better. In cases where the police don’t lay charges, children’s aid intervenes and helps the victims on a regular basis. However, for sexual abuse, there isn’t any way an adult can justify that they attempted to discipline a child. “It is totally crossing the line, it’s abnormal, … I would lay a charge right away,” officer said.
You can go back to the history of the abuser to know “why.” A lot of times they have been abused too, but it is not all the time. “I think people can change and learn, the court decides that and makes decisions accordingly, but what the victim wants should matter. If seeing the abuser in jail makes them feel safer and happy, the abuser must be in jail. Our duty is to protect the victims,” the officer said.
Clemente said that “yes, abusers can be victims and victims can be abusers, but it is only sometimes, and it is a dangerous narrative to follow. This narrative delegitimizes the experience. of the victim.” The psychological functionality for different accused people can vary, but it is mostly control-based, and a child is an easy target, partly because children cannot protect themselves, so their body is interchangeably used for sexual and physical abuse. A lot of times where both abuses occur, sexual abuse goes unseen because of physical abuse. “We see children coming in for non-compliance, anger issues and so on,” Clemente said. “The report is usually or always for physical abuse first and sexual abuse comes in the form of a discovery during the therapy or investigation.”
The groundwork for normalized interactions is created by the time a person is three years old. The foundation of social and interpersonal relationships is also set by then. Your behaviour will be affected depending on when the abuse happened and by whom. If it is at an early stage by someone from the core group of “safe people” (parents and close family members), it elevates the natural protection we have as people. There isn’t a concept of “things we don’t do to people you keep safe,” Clemente said. “When someone who is supposed to keep you safe, abuses you, it creates an Asterix, … Abuse isn’t off the table now that you’ve faced it.” But it is not everyone’s case, and we need to always see the victim as a person before looking at them through their victimhood.
Tanisha, now 17, is scared of her mother and father who just came back home unexpectedly. She remains in the box, which could’ve been a safe place, home, where she could sing her happy songs.
“I see my life in stages — that night, a stage ended,” she said. “I sang that happy song and everything seemed so nice; nothing was happy after that. We live in a movie-like family where we are full of problems and sadness, but when the cameras flash, we all smile.”
