Confronting Sexual Abuse In Jewish Families

LOWENSTEIN, SHARON R.

SHARON R. LOWENSTEIN Incest and child sexual abuse are Jewish problems waiting to be uncovered. I know we Jews prefer not to confront these issues. But I also know how denial brings added harm to...

...Child sexual abuse includes the adult use of children for open-mouth kissing, anal and vaginal intercourse, oral sex, genital fondling and pornography...
...Denial leads us to focus on symptoms rather than the problem itself...
...Every victim knows that feeling...
...3) this is for your own good because you can trust only me not to hurt you...
...Rabbis should confront communal denial from the pulpit and offer support to individuals...
...But I also know how denial brings added harm to victims...
...eler in a foreign country....I must somehow break through the evil of silence—tell other victims they are not alone...
...The myth that Jewish families and incestuous families are a contradiction in terms serves not to protect our children but to continue their exploitation...
...We experienced the terror of having our bodies belong not to us but to our perpetrators...
...They need to be able to tell themselves that their victims want it as much as they do...
...After all, he always told the truth...
...Incest and child sexual abuse need to be addressed publicly in the Jewish community...
...We must insist that they accept responsibility in order to help their victims heal—and thereby help themselves as well...
...While I know of Jewish women victimized as children by mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, uncles, aunts, brothers, cousins, teachers and friends of the family, the overwhelming number were abused by fathers...
...Similarly, the Jewish community believes that disclosure will undermine cherished values and family life, and also will embarrass the community itself...
...Jewish child victims and adult survivors should hear from the pulpit as well as from therapists that they are not alone and are not to blame...
...As a community and as individuals, we are repulsed by incest and child abuse and see no need to talk about it...
...5. Understand that child victims must be dealt with openly and honestly to the extent possible according to age, that children can be expected to deny the activity until sufficient trust is developed and that children need continual assurance that they are not to blame...
...One of my survivor friends wrote a Passover haggadah relating the story of her struggle for freedom from the trauma of incest to the story of the Exodus...
...Perpetrators must be told that abuse is always damaging and that it must stop...
...2) When you were a teenager [ asked him why he went to your room late at night, he said to check your covers, and I believed him...
...Most victims of child sexual abuse block out the memories and live with pain they do not understand...
...My friends include a Jewish woman who had a coat hanger wrapped around her throat until she lost consciousness after she tried to resist a father who raped her repeatedly and forced her brother to do so as well...
...I am married to a successful businessman, and we have raised children, now grown, who share our Jewish values...
...Soon after, my father succumbed to severe depression punctuated by hysterical outbursts...
...Box K, Augusta, Maine 04330, (207) 6263402...
...Abused children are betrayed children: they have learned not to trust...
...We blamed ourselves when we responded to the stimulation...
...I had amnesia about the nighttime sexual abuse until psychoanalysis enabled me to recover my memories...
...To do so effectively, I now choose to give up my anonymity...
...This is consistent with studies in the general community, where one researcher has noted that the father and mother are likely to have "an unspoken agreement to validate one another...
...Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, Alice Miller...
...Another is seeking a mikveh (ritual bath) ceremony to help her feel purified after years of ritual abuse...
...A victim does not want to accept the reality of the experience, especially when the perpetrator is someone loved and trusted...
...I am also an adult survivor of prolonged child sexual abuse...
...One-fourth of adults who were sexually abused as children grow up to become perpetrators...
...And they want you to know that they grew up in American-born, middle-class Jewish families with Orthodox, Conservative and Reform affiliations...
...Find out what counseling centers are available locally and call them for advice...
...workshops for professionals in other fields, forums for the public, training for rap group leaders and support groups for survivors...
...When we fail to help children that we know are in abusive situations, we protect the perpetrator and abet in the entrapment and ongoing abuse of the child...
...We learn to feel treif, in the deepest sense of the word...
...Denial, which promotes secrecy, comes in many forms...
...Jewish denial stems in part from the association of incest with rape and physical brutality...
...Local and national organizations should include incest and child abuse in their programs on Jewish family problems...
...My mother gave me a good start as an infant and my daytime father always showed normal, healthy paternal interest and affection...
...They are Reform, Conservative and Orthodox...
...But while incestuous families are indeed aberrant, they often appear to be "healthy" and "normal...
...My parents, of modest means, were respected as a hardworking, good family and as synagogue people who lived in accordance with the somewhat loosely defined expectations for observance in Midwestern Orthodoxy...
...And we learned to hate our bodies...
...6. The victim should finally experience physical and emotional self-mastery...
...I feel like a travPeople who place great value on children, as do Jews, can still be child abusers and coconspirators, but they must rationalize more...
...Stages to Recovery Just as mourners go through a grieving process, survivors of sexual abuse go through these steps to recovery: 1. Victims must permit themselves to identify the abusive experience...
...Seventy-five percent of incestuous fathers use subtle pressure and seductive persuasion rather than force...
...Religious schools and day schools should provide educational programs for students and parents...
...There are even some cases of Jews torturing their sons and daughters ritually in satanic cults...
...and (3) When you took the pills he said that all teenage girls do such things, arid I believed him...
...The existence of incestuous, even brutal, families among us does not repudiate the existence of normal or superior families...
...I was more fortunate than most victims of sexual abuse...
...Neither my husband nor my children learned of my long struggle for recovery until I had cleared the biggest hurdles...
...A victim of several date rapes does not recognize the ways in which she places herself in jeopardy and how this relates to her incestuous history—a circumstance which does not, of course, absolve the rapist of responsibility...
...Father-Daughter Incest, Judith Herman, Harvard University Press, 1981...
...Family service agencies should provide How Victims Can Cet Help Adult survivors of sexual abuse need help to deal with their feelings about their experiences...
...They walked me for hours before permitting me to sleep...
...Furthermore, she knows that disclosure may destroy the family and she believes herself responsible for keeping the family intact—a feat possible only as long as she continues to be silent and thus remains the victim...
...I buried myself-in work...
...In the population as a whole, a significant minority of perpetrators—25 percent—do use force and take pleasure in inflicting pain...
...When I grew sufficiently strong to take them into my confidence, they supported me on my journey to full health...
...After I left for college, I rarely returned home...
...Recent studies indicate that one out of every four females and one out of every seven males in the United States experience some form of sexual abuse before age 16...
...It permits the victim to continue believing that the victim is "bad," that the victim is the cause of the parents' behavior and mat the vie tim deserves what is happening to him or her...
...3. Read the following excellent books: I Never Told Anyone, Ellen Bass and Louise Thornton, Harper & Row, 1983...
...By its denial, the community abets the perpetrator, entraps the family and perpetuates the problem, —S.L...
...The woman asked me, "How do we wake up the Jewish community...
...Jewish agencies and schools should have specialists in child sexual abuse and incest meet with their staffs...
...To the extent appropriate for the child's age and level of understanding, we need to be as straightforward as possible in order to demonstrate our own trustworthiness...
...We act on our commitment to those values...
...At least 20 percent of adult survivors of incest and child sexual abuse suffer severe episodes of drug or alcohol dependency...
...she is afraid to examine why she sobs when watching a film about incest, yet she does not react so strongly when viewing a film on the Holocaust...
...It protects anonymity and will arrange special meetings and activities for specific groups, such as Jewish survivors' groups...
...when we find out differ-endy, we feel we betrayed—and we were betrayed—by the Jewish community...
...While sexual abuse is not the only explanation for such problems, it is a common cause...
...Strong-willed and proud, determined to see her family as she wished it to be, she blocked out much—I learned the technique from her...
...A highly respected Jewish attorney who takes great pride in having successfully represented several fathers accused of being perpetrators said to me, "Even if there was digital penetration, what's the big deal...
...Regretfully, I now believe Jews are no different in this respect from the rest of the population...
...This is consistent with the Jewish cases with which I am familiar...
...Today I view my father's suicide as a self-inflicted execution brought on by guilt...
...3. Take this article and other materials to a professional in whom you have confidence, your rabbi, for example...
...The purpose of all such efforts should be education, intervention and support...
...Most adults who were sexually victimized as children suffer severe bouts of depression and self-destructiveness...
...people in business and housewives...
...I was seated at dinner with a highly respected male member of the Jewish community who said to me, "How can you be so sure that incest is always damaging...
...We Jews are reluctant to identify what child abuse is and who does it...
...2. Seek a private therapist through incest survivor groups or professionals you trust...
...These figures, which cut across racial and socioeconomic lines, are consistent with the 1948 Kinsey study in which one-fourth of his 4,000 female respondents reported that adult males had attempted or succeeded in having sex with them while they were children...
...Seeking to let other victims know they are not alone, I began by writing anonymously to avoid sensationalism...
...This group is well organized and administered...
...Whether inorgasmic or able to have multiple orgasms, adult survivors of child sexual abuse generally are dissociated from sexual feelings...
...They attended religious school and Hebrew school...
...Various phobias and hysterical conversions sometimes reenact fears associated with sexual abuse...
...My father, a delivery man and salesman, had a solid reputation for generosity and integrity...
...When my rabbi gave a sermon on child sexual abuse last year, the announced subject drew the smallest number of congregants in months...
...Like the incest, it remained a closed book...
...This often does not become apparent until the children no longer live in the abusive situation...
...Why does he think otherwise...
...Adults who were sexually abused as children are more likely to find partners who physically abuse them—80 percent of battered wives were sexually victimized as children...
...The myth demands secrecy...
...These adult survivors of childhood sexual torture talk to me because they want me to talk to you...
...I want also to educate the Jewish community...
...Most incest involves neither rape nor physical brutality...
...Child sexual abuse directly influences adult relationships and generational behavior...
...Denial—which is nowhere greater than in the Jewish community—inflicts heavy penalties...
...A man who was, in my mother's eyes, "honest to a fault," he had a habit of bringing home strangers who needed a meal or an opportunity to earn a few dollars for household work...
...Learn about child sexual abuse so you can identify a child in trouble...
...Vou need not give your name...
...A few years after I left for college and established a life of my own, he killed himself...
...But secrecy is the enemy of the victim and, ultimately, of the community...
...Denial by the Jewish community brings great additional pain...
...S.L...
...This feeling of empowerment is essential to reclaiming the physical, psychological and emotional self and healing the wounds of abuse...
...At the funeral, the rabbi, who believed himself close to each of us, shared with us his bewilderment and broke into tears...
...The Jewish survivors I know include attorneys, psychologists, academicians, a university administrator, graduate students, communal leaders, teachers, Confronting Sexual Abuse in Jewish Families A Victimized Child Feels Treif As a child trapped in an incestuous relationship—my father molested me from infancy until I left for college—I understood that I was treif...
...Related problems include anorexia and bulimia, which sometimes result from the victim's having been forced to use the mouth for oral sex...
...Whether high achievers without apparent problems or dysfunctional and antisocial, both male and female survivors of child sexual abuse share a number of past experiences...
...2. The victim must work to overcome self-doubt and denial—in therapy and/or in a support group...
...Intellectual understanding may already have existed for some time...
...Until we work through these issues, we will go through life finding it difficult to trust, to establish and maintain intimate relationships, and to enjoy our sexuality...
...Countless anonymous children experience additional pain because we Jews continue to deny the problem...
...Childhood sexual abuse inflicts excruciating damage, often in people who become high achievers...
...4. Ask the professional to arrange a small-group intervention meeting in which the perpetrator is confronted and forced to admit the behavior, agree to stop it immediately and obtain counseling for the child, for him or herself and for the family...
...recent studies suggest that the figure may be as high as 50 to 70 percent...
...The following guidelines will help you help a child who is currently being abused...
...Where there has been intense overstimulation, the consequences are similar whether or not intercourse occurred...
...Children find it extraordinarily difficult to accept betrayal by those whom they love and on whom they depend, Thats why they turn their rage on themselves instead and become self-destructive...
...Two months later, they left on vacation so that he could get a grip on his nerves...
...We had to endure physical sensations that we could not control and did not understand...
...Before her Depression-era marriage, she had completed two years of college and had worked as an executive secretary for a large retailer...
...Rather than being controlled by body and impulses, the individual will feel in control...
...Not infrequently adults know a child who is being abused and find it easier to look the other way because they don't know what to do and prefer not to get involved...
...Tell the rabbi in confidence that you know a child who you believe is being abused and that you are seeking the rabbi's assistance to help the child...
...My family attended shut with some regularity...
...A woman, who screams uncontrollably when she reaches a point of sexual arousal, does not understand why she has dreams in which her husband suddenly becomes her father...
...Most of it occurs within the family—it is incestuous...
...The pain is private, but the problem is communal...
...Whether we are or are not consciously aware of such feelings as adults, we act upon them in both our intrapsychic and interpersonal lives...
...1. Become knowledgeable about the issues and indicators...
...One woman described to me her torment after learning that her father had sexually abused her daughters...
...Neither one discussed the incident with me...
...Secrecy, however, is the ally of the perpetrator...
...Most perpetrators, incestuous and otherwise, insist that forcing sex on children is repugnant...
...They often are especially well-liked and well-respected model citizens who make a point of being seen as conforming to traditional family norms...
...Often self-mutilating behaviors appear, most frequently where sexual and/ or physical abuse was most brutal...
...We are your relatives, friends and colleagues...
...Jewish survivors too often feel alienated from their Jewish as well as their sexual identity...
...Sacrificing without complaint, she thought that appropriate as "a mother's role...
...Finally, all of us should learn how to talk openly about incest and child sexual abuse...
...See box, p. 50...
...Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984...
...I am a middle-aged professional woman and a Jewish communal leader...
...S.L But it is a big deal...
...When we are forced to acknowledge that incest exists among us, we prefer to think it occurs only in "bad" or "sick" families...
...You should adapt them to what is appropriate for children at different ages...
...She screamed, "How could you do this," while my father poured soapy water down my throat and repeatedly forced me to vomit...
...My achievements and her friends' accolades gave proof of her success as a wife and mother...
...My mother and I did not discuss my father's suicide during sfwa (the mourning period) or afterwards...
...My mother, articulate and tactful, worked hard, ably managed limited resources, made most of the family's decisions and maintained a well-kept home...
...My friends include a non-Jewish woman who suffered food deprivation and brutal sexual assaults over many years at the hands of her Jewish stepfather and stepbrothers...
...The secrecy must stop...
...5. The victim must fit the experience into his or her life so that the victim controls it rather than being controlled by it, If this occurs, then, for example, rather than reiect his or her body, the person will accept and enjoy it...
...I sat with my mother in the women's balcony and watched my father daven (pray) with great sincerity in the pews below...
...4. Join a national incest survivors' group, I recommend Looking Up, P.O...
...Some psychiatrists and psychologists believe that sexual abuse accounts for as many as one-third of all suicide attempts...
...A community that ignores or denies the prevalence of incest and sexual abuse is maintaining an environment protective of such behavior and placing future generations in jeopardy...
...They exist side-by-side and are often, from the outside, indistinguishable from each other...
...Another friend recognizes that she has buried her body in fat in an effort to avoid sex...
...A senior rabbi responded to a story of incest by giving more aliyot (honors by calling a person up to chant the Torah blessings) to the perpetrator...
...A friend struggling with suicidal feelings vaguely remembers being sexually abused by an uncle but does not connect the incest to the desire for self-destruction until talking to me and entering therapy...
...If you are a survivor: 1. Call your local women's resource center, rape crisis center, victims' organization or family service center for information about anonymous self-help or counseling groups for victims of sexual abuse or assault...
...Secrecy protects perpetrators, permits non-offending spouses to maintain a facade that facilitates denial, traps victims in ongoing abuse, and alienates survivors from vital sources of support within the Jewish community...
...Jewish families and incestuous families are not incongruous...
...3. As a victim struggles to overcome self-doubt and denial, he or she experiences alternating periods of acceptance and of anger toward self and others...
...Sexual abuse is not a pleasant subject...
...2) I do this out of love and I love only you...
...Rather than fearing to let go and enjoy sexuality, the person will be free to do so...
...Until recently, I believed that Jewish perpetrators were far less likely to be physically abusive than non-Jewish perpetrators...
...Despite the efforts of the victims' grandmother to protect the perpetrator, the woman recently learned that her father also had molested at least one of her sisters...
...Seventy-five percent of child molestation does not involve intercourse...
...She gave me love as a baby but withdrew emotionally as she became absorbed in her own problems...
...The Jewish perpetrators whom I know include leading businessmen, attorneys, physicians, religious and communal leaders, a talmu-dic scholar, and a yeshivah teacher...
...and (4) it is better for you to learn from me than from anyone else because no one can love you as I do...
...I find it increasingly difficult to believe these statistics are less applicable to Jews...
...Perpetrators live, work and socialize among us and cannot be distinguished from non-perpetrators...
...Nonoffending spouses who are not confronting the perpetrators need to be empowered to do so...
...4. The victim must develop an understanding of the nature of the molesting on an emotional level...
...2. Identify available resources in your community...
...My mother's explanations: (1) When you were five I asked him if he was doing anything to you he wasn't supposed to, he denied it, and I believed him...
...She readily made and retained friends and never voiced dissatisfaction or disappointment...
...Life continued as usual, and I was left to survive on my own...
...My father's rationalizations: (1)1 will never hurt you...
...We do not threaten Jewish values when we recognize and address the problem...
...Studies indicate that 85 percent of all children who are molested are abused by people they know and trust, that more.than 85 percent of the perpetrators are male, and that fathers comprise the single largest group...
...My mother discovered me...
...These examples of Jewish women I know may speak directly to you—or to someone close to you...
...When I was 15,1 swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills...
...It is, however, one that should be addressed within a Jewish context...
...Healing the Incest Wound, Christine Courtois, W. W. Norton, 1988...
...For months afterwards, my mother received condolence notes with small checks for repayment of loans that my father had made to people unknown to her...
...We grow up believing "Jews don't do such things...
...From my mother I learned stamina and, from the kind of honesty of which my daytime father was capable, I developed a certain straightforward integrity, two traits that proved especially useful when I entered psychoanalysis...

Vol. 15 • April 1990 • No. 2


 
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