Best 572 quotes in «child abuse quotes» category

The most important thing in defining child sexual abuse is the experience of the child. It takes very little for a child’s world to be devastated. A single experience can have a profound impact on a child’s life. A man sticks his hand in his daughter’s underpants, or strokes his son’s penis once, and for that child, the world is never the same again.

The most treasured gift you can present yourself today is a hand of assistance to liberate you from the prison of anxiety, fear, & stress so that you can set free.

The Pain is too much to bear She weeps within; As she grinds her teeth with a grin

The past of childhood abuse is not possible to forget; however, it is achievable to thrive

The Persian rug served as their country with people living in jade green jungles and others living in an opal cream sky. They were so light. No one would ever be able to tell that they had lived there.

The Persian rug served as their country. The brawnier toilet paper people opted to live in its jade green jungles while the more sensitive and reflective toilet paper people preferred hiding in its opal cream sky. They were so light. No one would ever be able to tell that they had lived there.

The programme into which Cheryl was inducted combined all the different ways the intelligence community had learned could cause intense psychological change in adults and children. It had been learned through the use of both knowledgeable and 'unwitting' volunteers. They were subjected to sensory overload, isolation, drugs and hypnosis, all used on bodies that had been weakened from mild hunger. The horror of the programme was that it would be like having an elementary school sex education class conducted by a paedophile rapist. It would have been banned had the American government signed the Helsinki Accords. But, of course, they hadn't. For the test that day and in those that followed, Cheryl Hersha was positioned so she faced a portable movie screen. A 16mm movie projector was on a platform, along with several reels of film. Each was a short pornographic film meant to make her aware of sexuality in a variety of forms...

The rape of a child is a violent act of contempt, not an expression of sexuality or affection.

The purpose of the false self is to defend against pain - not deal with reality

There are a range of useful and illuminating analyses of the media construction of organised abuse as it became front-page news in the 1980s and 1990s (Kitzinger 2004, Atmore 1997, Kelly 1998), but this book is focused on organised abuse as a criminal practice; as well as a discursive object of study, debate and disagreement. These two dimensions of this topic are inextricably linked because precisely where and how organised abuse is reported to take place is an important determinant of how it is understood. Prior to the 1980s, the predominant view of the police, psychiatrists and other authoritative professionals was that organised abuse occurred primarily outside the family where it was committed by extra-familial ‘paedophiles’. This conceptualisation; of organised abuse has received enduring community support to the present day, where concerns over children’s safety is often framed in terms of their vulnerability to manipulation by ‘paedophiles’ and ‘sex rings’. This view dovetails more generally with the medico-legal and media construction of the ‘paedophile as an external threat to the sanctity of the family and community (Cowburn and Dominelli 2001) but it is confounded by evidence that organised abuse and other forms of serious sexual abuse often originates in the home or in institutions, such as schools and churches, where adults have socially legitimate authority over children.

The reality is, no matter what you were told, whatever happened to you as a child was not legally or morally your fault. Abused children are instilled with guilt regarding their "participation." It's an especially complex issue if the abuser is a family member. The child is told and believes that by his word his family will disintegrate, or harm may descend upon other loved ones. He fears he will lose more by telling than not.

There are two types of memory frequently experienced by individuals who have had overwhelming trauma that has been suppressed psychologically or chemically. The first is general memory, experienced as an adult, in which there is a natural recall of early events. The other is the memory that is often associated with post traumatic stress syndrome (PTSS). The person suddenly smells, sees and feels as though he or she is actually living the event that took place months or years earlier. Many soldiers who survived horrifying combat experiences have PTSS. This has frequently been discussed in terms of Vietnam veterans who suddenly mentally find themselves in the jungle, hiding from the enemy or assaulting people they see as a threat. The fact that they have not been in Vietnam for decades and that they are experiencing the flashbacks in shopping malls, at home or at work does not change what they are mentally reliving. But PTSS has existed for centuries and has affected men, women and children in the midst of all wars, horrifying natural disasters and other traumatic experiences. This includes physical and sexual abuse when growing up. the PTSS Cheryl was experiencing more and more frequently, in which she found herself seeing, feeling and re-experiencing events from her childhood and adolescence had become overwhelming. She knew she needed to get help.

There are parents who use their small children as weapons. They are weak people. Sick people. And their children are watching them, watching how Mom and Dad use them as weapons.

There can be no love without justice. Until we live in a culture that no only respects but also upholds basic civil rights for children, most children will not know love.

There is an intensified risk for a child living in a household experiencing domestic violence, because their basic childhood requirement is not being met, in addition to the demand for care and protection by their parents.

There is an intergenerational reoccurrence rate of 30% in incest.

There’s a general sense now that children’s rights, children’s needs, children’s wants and desires have taken on too prominent a place in our family lives. That we’ve over indulged them and now have to tighten the reins. The backlash is, at base, against ourselves — against a form of boomer and postboomer parenting that many agree has gone off the rails. But the targets of that backlash — its victims — are children. 'People as individuals and in societies mistreat children in order to fulfill certain needs through them, to project internal conflicts and self-hatreds outward, or to assert themselves when they feel their authority has been questioned,' Young-Bruehl wrote. We often use children as pillars for our narcissism, she said, and, in particular, tend to use them to provide salve for our narcissistic wounds. The more that we’re wounded — and, I think it’s fair to argue that almost all of us have been wounded in the devastating economic downturn of the past several years — the more angrily we make our demands. The more adults feel 'beleaguered and without power,' she noted, the more rage they vent at their kids for not making them feel valued, respected, even loved. Young-Bruehl noted that the concept of childism can — and should — force us to think differently about the whole range of parent behavior ranging from spanking to child abuse, just like the acknowledgment of sexism in society led us decades ago to think differently about rape. With a heightened understanding of prejudice against women, rape came to be seen less as an outgrowth of unrestrained male libido and more as a perverse manifestation of the abuse of male power: incest too, soon afterward, came to be seen in that light. Her extrapolation from sexism to childism teaches, then, that we can’t simply think of freakish acts of child abuse — like the case of the 9-year-old Alabama girl run to death by her stepmother and grandmother as punishment for eating a candy bar — as entirely isolated crimes. We have to think of them in a context of prejudice against children — and of diffuse adult feelings of impotence and rage — that is widespread enough that it’s all too easy for an unbalanced parent to cross the line between discipline and abuse.

There was nothing you could be sure about, it was all lies, and it was all done to mess with minds because the control and the power trip was so important to them, as well as it being necessary in terms of screwing up anything you might remember from an evidential perspective. They would also build up your hopes, in terms of any tiny thing you did like or were less scared of, so I'd be told that it would be a nice night because Uncle Andrew would be coming, but then it wouldn't be him. There would be someone else There would be someone else who I was told was my Uncle Andrew as he was raping me. Sometimes, this other person would have a mask on but I would know that it wasn't really him. They would be the wrong height or the wrong weight or, sometimes, even obviously a woman. There were occasions when I would be told to call the person Uncle Andrew and then when I did, they would ask me why I was doing that. Sometimes he would be there, too, but that was rare. Was it Satanic? I don't know. Personally I don't believe in God or Satan or any of those things, but abusers use whatever they can to silence children because if you go to the police and say something about Satan, you are so much less likely to be believed. I personally think they were just a group of likeminded people who had no beliefs other than that they wanted to get satisfaction out of abusing children and it's as simple and horrible as that. My uncle certainly doesn't have any satanic beliefs — he just thinks that he loves children and is allowed to get sexual satisfaction from them. Why is there sex involved if it is just about Satan? Why does it always come down to them getting off? No matter what they do that's all it is, whether masturbation or penetration or humiliation, that's what it's about. I encountered people who just liked to humiliate — they wouldn't allow you to go to the bathroom, you would be given drink after drink, fizzy drinks, whatever, so you ended up absolutely desperate and that's where they got off — that's when they started to masturbate themselves, as you stood there peeing yourself. That was just awful, so humiliating. Where is God or Satan in that? (her Uncle was convicted for abusing her and jailed)

The responsibility to end Child sexual abuse is yours and mine!

The return of the voices would end in a migraine that made my whole body throb. I could do nothing except lie in a blacked-out room waiting for the voices to get infected by the pains in my head and clear off. Knowing I was different with my OCD, anorexia and the voices that no one else seemed to hear made me feel isolated, disconnected. I took everything too seriously. I analysed things to death. I turned every word, and the intonation of every word over in my mind trying to decide exactly what it meant, whether there was a subtext or an implied criticism. I tried to recall the expressions on people’s faces, how those expressions changed, what they meant, whether what they said and the look on their faces matched and were therefore genuine or whether it was a sham, the kind word touched by irony or sarcasm, the smile that means pity. When people looked at me closely could they see the little girl in my head, being abused in those pornographic clips projected behind my eyes? That is what I would often be thinking and such thoughts ate away at the façade of self-confidence I was constantly raising and repairing. (describing dissociative identity disorder/mpd symptoms)

There were other strange signals and signs. Another day, suddenly felt an almost overwhelming urge to travel to Balitmore. I wanted to 'kidnap' a helicoper fly it there if I didn't drive the there', she explains. 'I had no idea where I was to go, only that I was certain I would know my destination as I encountered signs and certain landmarks along the way. I was not even certain who I was to meet, or what my mission was, but I felt I must go.' Beginning to heal by this time with Talbon's help, she resisted that urge. Yet she sensed she would be summoned for three more Cat Woman missions: two in 1999 and one in 2000. As for the code words for activating her, those had been erased from Cheryl's conscious memory. Buried deep in her unconscious mind, however, the words, when called up, cause her to react as her programmers want her to. Though she can't remember the activation codes, Cheryl knows her handlers said the same things every time. 'I'm working on unblocking the words in therapy. Once I know what the words are, I can learn how to stop their effect on me. I did it already when I learned the control code. Standing in front of a mirror, I said the control code words over and over until I was completely desensitised to them. That's what I have to do for the activation code words... but I have not been able to recall all of them as yet.' Dr. Talbon was struck by another very important thing. 'It all hung together. The stories Cheryl told - even though it was upsetting to think people could do stuff like that - they were not disjointed. They were not repetitive in terms of "I've heard this before". It was not just trying consciously or unconsciously to get attention. She'd really processed them out and was done with them. She didn't come up with it again [after telling the story once and dealing with it]. Once it was done, it was done. And I think that was probably the biggest factor for me in her believability. I got no sense that she was using these stories to make herself a really interesting person to me so I'd really want to work with her, or something.

There were times in my life when I had no strength left for one more day.

The rural, mid-19th-century dialect, coupled with the author's interest in ethnobotany, roots the story deeply in the houses, forests, gardens, and even streambeds of antebellum Virginia. –School Library Journal

The rush I got from crime was better than that of glue, drink or hash. I loved playing cat and mouse with the local coppers. He Who Dares Wins, the SAS motto, was very applicable to my life then.

The second factor helping to bring the dissociative disorders back into the mainstream was the Vietnam War. For sociological reasons originating outside psychology and psychiatry, the Vietnam War and the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that arose from it were not forgotten when the veterans returned home, as had been the case in the two world wars and the Korean War. The realization that real, severe trauma could have serious long-term psychopathological consequences was forced on society as a whole by Vietnam. Once this principle was accepted, it as a short leap to the conclusion that severe childhood trauma might have serious sequelae lasting into adulthood.

The sole reason I stand to open it up now is that lots of people who are in pain just like I was, and when they see that there is still hope, they will discover that it is possible to come out of their prison.

The themes that exercised the minds of survivor movements and their allies within the health and welfare professions generated a political project: how to revolutionise medical and judicial approaches to injured adults and children, how to raise awareness so that other people didn’t have to suffer the same, and how to understand, and then challenge, offenders who so love what they do to children that they can and must shut their minds to the feelings of children who have put their trust in them. P4

The story of my birth that my mother told me went like this: "When you were coming out I wasn't ready yet and neither was the nurse. The nurse tried to push you back in, but I shit on the table and when you came out, you landed in my shit." If there ever was a way to sum things up, the story of my birth was it.

The survivor movements were also challenging the notion of a dysfunctional family as the cause and culture of abuse, rather than being one of the many places where abuse nested. This notion, which in the 1990s and early 1980s was the dominant understanding of professionals characterised the sex abuser as a pathetic person who had been denied sex and warmth by his wife, who in turn denied warmth to her daughters. Out of this dysfunctional triad grew the far-too-cosy incest dyad. Simply diagnosed, relying on the signs: alcoholic father, cold distant mother, provocative daughter. Simply resolved, because everyone would want to stop, to return to the functioning family where mum and dad had sex and daughter concentrated on her exams. Professionals really believed for a while that sex offenders would want to stop what they were doing. They thought if abuse were decriminalised, abusers would seek help. The survivors knew different. P5

The truth is misrepresented, distorted, altered, tampered and changed in the mind of the child.

Things I Used to Get Hit For: Talking back. Being smart. Acting stupid. Not listening. Not answering the first time. Not doing what I’m told. Not doing it the second time I’m told. Running, jumping, yelling, laughing, falling down, skipping stairs, lying in the snow, rolling in the grass, playing in the dirt, walking in mud, not wiping my feet, not taking my shoes off. Sliding down the banister, acting like a wild Indian in the hallway. Making a mess and leaving it. Pissing my pants, just a little. Peeing the bed, hardly at all. Sleeping with a butter knife under my pillow. Shitting the bed because I was sick and it just ran out of me, but still my fault because I’m old enough to know better. Saying shit instead of crap or poop or number two. Not knowing better. Knowing something and doing it wrong anyway. Lying. Not confessing the truth even when I don’t know it. Telling white lies, even little ones, because fibbing isn’t fooling and not the least bit funny. Laughing at anything that’s not funny, especially cripples and retards. Covering up my white lies with more lies, black lies. Not coming the exact second I’m called. Getting out of bed too early, sometimes before the birds, and turning on the TV, which is one reason the picture tube died. Wearing out the cheap plastic hole on the channel selector by turning it so fast it sounds like a machine gun. Playing flip-and-catch with the TV’s volume button then losing it down the hole next to the radiator pipe. Vomiting. Gagging like I’m going to vomit. Saying puke instead of vomit. Throwing up anyplace but in the toilet or in a designated throw-up bucket. Using scissors on my hair. Cutting Kelly’s doll’s hair really short. Pinching Kelly. Punching Kelly even though she kicked me first. Tickling her too hard. Taking food without asking. Eating sugar from the sugar bowl. Not sharing. Not remembering to say please and thank you. Mumbling like an idiot. Using the emergency flashlight to read a comic book in bed because batteries don’t grow on trees. Splashing in puddles, even the puddles I don’t see until it’s too late. Giving my mother’s good rhinestone earrings to the teacher for Valentine’s Day. Splashing in the bathtub and getting the floor wet. Using the good towels. Leaving the good towels on the floor, though sometimes they fall all by themselves. Eating crackers in bed. Staining my shirt, tearing the knee in my pants, ruining my good clothes. Not changing into old clothes that don’t fit the minute I get home. Wasting food. Not eating everything on my plate. Hiding lumpy mashed potatoes and butternut squash and rubbery string beans or any food I don’t like under the vinyl seat cushions Mom bought for the wooden kitchen chairs. Leaving the butter dish out in summer and ruining the tablecloth. Making bubbles in my milk. Using a straw like a pee shooter. Throwing tooth picks at my sister. Wasting toothpicks and glue making junky little things that no one wants. School papers. Notes from the teacher. Report cards. Whispering in church. Sleeping in church. Notes from the assistant principal. Being late for anything. Walking out of Woolworth’s eating a candy bar I didn’t pay for. Riding my bike in the street. Leaving my bike out in the rain. Getting my bike stolen while visiting Grandpa Rudy at the hospital because I didn’t put a lock on it. Not washing my feet. Spitting. Getting a nosebleed in church. Embarrassing my mother in any way, anywhere, anytime, especially in public. Being a jerk. Acting shy. Being impolite. Forgetting what good manners are for. Being alive in all the wrong places with all the wrong people at all the wrong times.

The unconscious mind always operates in the present tense, and when a memory is buried in the unconscious, the unconscious preserves it as an ongoing act of abuse in the present of the unconscious mind. The cost of repressing a memory is that the mind does not know the abuse ended.

The way in which the child is manipulated pulls them into considering the lies.

The witch-hunt narrative is a really popular story that goes like this: Lots of people were falsely convicted of child sexual abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s. And they were all victims of a witch-hunt. It just doesn’t happen to line up with the facts when you actually look at the cases themselves in detail. But it’s a really popular narrative — I think it’s absolutely fair to say that’s the conventional wisdom. It’s what most people now think is the uncontested truth, and those cases had no basis in fact. And what 15 years of painstaking trial court research (says) is that that’s not a very fair description of those cases, and in fact many of those cases had substantial evidence of abuse. The witch-hunt narrative is that these were all gross injustices to the defendant. In fact, what it looks like in retrospect is the injustices were much more often to children.

The worst part ever is discoursing about the abuse to anyone you trust in the family or friends and when they prefer not to believe in you, that feeling of being deserted by people you trusted and spoke to is even more painful than the whole trauma of the abuse and insult.

They illustrate that since no one really loves or cares for them, why should they love or care for themselves?

This book would be a great addition to a classroom library, especially considering its emphases on timeless and critical topics like discrimination and prejudice. –examiner.com, National Book Examiner

This is my life and I am the expert of my life, nobody else is.

This is for the kids who know that the worst kind of fear isn't the thing that makes you scream, but the one that steals your voice and keeps you silent.

This was a new buzz, better than anything I’d tried before. For the first time, I could fight back at others. I’d even fight with a parked car! I was totally kyboshed on these drugs, I didn’t care how many boys were standing outside the pub, I’d run over and fight the lot of them. Even though I came off second best, in my mind, I still walked away a winner. I showed them I wasn’t a little shit-bag that always got battered, not when I had the drugs in me.

Those who were molested or beaten as children or teenagers might later be vulnerable to sexual abuse or violence, because their natural impulses to protect themselves and protest (physical and verbal) were extinguished. Expectation of hurtful treatment by others or one's own failed capabilities can stubbornly persist despite overwhelming evidence that such is no longer the case.

Though, the type of abuse differs from each individual, all survivors of child abuse deal with a certain extent of trauma, consciously or unconsciously.

The vast majority of incest begins years before the earliest conceivable age of consent. p4

The war is against children, and all the other wars are just a shadow of the war on children.

Think twice before you pull your trouser and rape a woman; she may be your mother, sister or friend, and you know the consequences that follows.

This monograph by Special Agent Ken Lanning (1992) is merely a guide for those who may investigate this phenomenon, as the title indicates, and not a study. The author is a well known skeptic regarding cult and ritual abuse allegations and has consulted on a number of cases but to our knowledge has not personally investigated the majority of these cases, some of which have produced convictions. p179 [refers to Lanning, K. V. (1992) Investigator's guide to allegations of "ritual" child abuse. Quantico, VA: National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime.]

This vacillation between assertion and denial in discussions about organised abuse can be understood as functional, in that it serves to contain the traumatic kernel at the heart of allegations of organised abuse. In his influential ‘just world’ theory, Lerner (1980) argued that emotional wellbeing is predicated on the assumption that the world is an orderly, predictable and just place in which people get what they deserve. Whilst such assumptions are objectively false, Lerner argued that individuals have considerable investment in maintaining them since they are conducive to feelings of self—efficacy and trust in others. When they encounter evidence contradicting the view that the world is just, individuals are motivated to defend this belief either by helping the victim (and thus restoring a sense of justice) or by persuading themselves that no injustice has occurred. Lerner (1980) focused on the ways in which the ‘just world’ fallacy motivates victim-blaming, but there are other defences available to bystanders who seek to dispel troubling knowledge. Organised abuse highlights the severity of sexual violence in the lives of some children and the desire of some adults to inflict considerable, and sometimes irreversible, harm upon the powerless. Such knowledge is so toxic to common presumptions about the orderly nature of society, and the generally benevolent motivations of others, that it seems as though a defensive scaffold of disbelief, minimisation and scorn has been erected to inhibit a full understanding of organised abuse. Despite these efforts, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in organised abuse and particularly ritualistic abuse (eg Sachs and Galton 2008, Epstein et al. 2011, Miller 2012).

Those who support such survivors of abuse often find it difficult to hear the reality of those survivors' lives and experience and are often unsupported themselves. Rather than being supported, workers are often ridiculed, castigated or accused of being gullible or of giving the survivor false memories. Many workers work in isolation and a climate of hostility and are unable to talk about the work they do. Yes, despite all the odds, survivors of ritual abuse are beginning to speak out about their experiences, and some people, mainly in voluntary organisations, are beginning to listen to them and support them. [Published 2001]

Through my willpower and strength, I can make a difference to the world because I am a Survivor.

To permit it to give away and move on, one needs to utter it out first, face it and work on it and this isn’t possible by silencing the act of abuse.