Shattering Silence and Shame of Child Sexual Abuse
7,433 days of silence. 20.4 years of holding a secret that wasn’t mine to keep. This isn’t something unheard of, as a matter of fact, 700,000 children are impacting by child abuse every single year and that number continues to climb. The other day I was talking a person, who unleashed their voice for the first time at age 72. Imagine, 26,280 days of silence.
26,280 days — keeping someone’s secret, a horrific secret that children are told to keep every 10 seconds. Imagine the shame, the horrific pain, the feeling to blame and lost and quiet. What about the feeling of having to be perfect and do all the things the right way. How about the child that is hurting, can’t show their skin in public because someone would know. What about the little girl that hasn’t ever learned the correct names of their body parts to be able to ever tell anyone what was happening.
Then…a pandemic of a lifetime comes around, February 2020. BAM! Children and families are now at home. Life is completely disrupted. What started as a couple weeks, went to a month, went to a few months, to now over a year. The impacts of this pandemic are much farther reaching than illness, masks, washing hands, a halt to travel or even death. The reach of this pandemic — of epic proportions — is on the children.
Ninety percent of children know their abuser. I was remembering back to when I was younger-say age 10. If there had been a pandemic, in 1983 and we were told that we had to stay home, do school from home and my parents had to work from home — I would be with my abuser 24x7. This is the situation that we are in, children are at home with their abusers, they are being watched by friends and family to help out — some of which are their abusers. A pandemic so impactful that the very adults that are mandatory reporters and are calling in abuse situations and children that are in need of support — can no longer see the child in person.
We have an epidemic of child abuse happening at epic proportions and no way to stop it…yet, maybe that isn’t true. What if we normalized the conversation, trained adults everywhere in prevention, taught children to understand their social emotional skills early on, the correct anatomical names for parts of their body, and powered children understand and execute consent. What if we normalized the conversations for survivors? What if there were platforms for survivors to tell their stories, no matter what their background is, no matter if they are famous or are a child of someone famous. What if we lifted the voices of these survivors — far beyond their hearts, their minds and walls? What if we shattered the silence and shame that comes with the abuse children are suffering?
The TIME IS NOW. We must continue to push — train all adults in child abuse prevention. When adults are given the tools to help stop abusers, to be able to identify the signs, and to have the courage to call other adults out — we change the trajectory of children’s lives.
When we teach children the correct anatomically body parts — giving them the language to speak the words that they need to protect themselves, teaching them its ok to use the correct language when we are talking about the sacredness of the human body — we give the power to children to shatter the silence and the shame of abuse and the shame that comes in our society related to our bodies.
When schools implement comprehensive sexual education and we teach children from a young age social emotional health and life…they learn the skills they need to know to grow up and stop the cycles of the abuse that some have been harboring.
The TIME IS NOW. We can no longer remain silent. We can no longer remain hidden. If you are a survivor — unleashing your voice not only shatters the silence and shame for yourself, but also for those who have not been able to do so.
We must stop the cycle. There is no such thing as other people’s children. We belong to each other.
