Child Sexual Assault Survivor Questions Answered

I have told you I am a survivor on more levels then one. I have told you your not alone. I have told you to seek out other survivors and counselors to help you get through your assault. It does not matter if you were assaulted as a child or adult you have a lot of questions in your mind and I am going to give you the brutally honest answers from both points of view, that of the victim and that of the abuser. This is nothing more then the cold hard fact. I will apologize to you if any of this sounds harsh to you but I started out writing this series with the intent on being completely honest and I sometimes that hurts and even now it hurts to write. So I am sorry for the tears I may cause.

If you are still asking the question why me? The honest answer is you were there. Every abuser has a type of person they look for hair color or maybe you remind them of someone but that doesn’t matter the fact is you were just there at the time. If you had not been there the victim simply would have been the person who was. Child sexual offenders are opportunistic by nature and will either take advantage of a situation that comes up or will create the opportunity itself by offering to babysit or otherwise watch over children.

You may ask what you did wrong. Well the truth is nothing, you did not do anything to bring this on yourself. As a child you are told to trust people around you, by instinct you trust mom and dad and then they tell you it is OK to trust other people and to watch out for the stranger and you learn that if some is friends with mom and dad your supposed to trust them as well. You are also supposed to be able to trust family members and people like teachers and coaches and sex offenders are well aware of this. They find ways to be friends with your parents and then abuse you and lie to you. So I can not say it enough you did nothing wrong.

You may even wonder what you could have done to stop the abuse. The fact is as a child you couldn’t because chances are you were scared. Very few children ever get the courage to tell especially when the offender is a family member or someone in a position of authority in your young life such as a mister, teacher, coach, babysitter, or the parent of one of your friends. Offenders know that certain dynamics in a child’s life make it less likely that a child will tell and they also know which buttons to push to keep you from telling even if that mean using treats against your life or that of your family. The fact is you were in one of the following groups to scare to tell because you were threatened, you didn’t tell because you believed no one would believe you, to embarrassed to tell, or you did make it stop because you were one of the brave few who did tell. I wish I were in the last group but unfortunately I wasn’t.

Even if you were in that last group and you did tell the questions still have to be answered. The counseling is still needed along with support of other survivors. It is only with the two things that you can answer the most important questions about becoming a survivor yourself. How do you move on? How do you keep from becoming an offender? How do you keep from becoming me?

I will tell you what I learned in my next article about how I protect children from me. Yes being open about my mistake is just one way but there is more to it because if any one who has ever committed an act of abuse against a child that says they are cured then they are lying not only to you but to themselves as well. It takes work everyday. I hope both sides of this from my life not only helps those who have been victimized as children but also opens the eyes of parents because not everyone around you that you trust can be trusted with your children. You will learn more about this in future articles.

Until next time.