My child’s sexual abuse started at 6 years old…here’s what Roe’s overturn would have done to us
Never in a million years would I have suspected that my angelic, almost otherworldly happy child was being sexually molested.
We saw changes starting to happen in the 3rd grade, but she told us it was a bullying situation. Three boys were indeed going after her, and it was bad enough that we had to pull her out of that school. The same gang went on to target two other kids that year, and they both also left the school–one with a broken wrist and years of therapy ahead of him. So, it seemed legit. It was the ‘bully year’ we told ourselves…she was just extraordinarily sensitive and had a terrible experience with violence at a young age.
Fast forward to 5th grade. At 10 years old, she got her period. I knew some kids got it early, but 10 seemed really, really young. On top of it, she had such debilitating pain from each monthly onset that we had to keep her home for the first one to two days of her cycle. Not much helped–we tried aspirin, heating pads, herbal patches…you name it. She just suffered. And suffered and suffered.
The following year, she decided to present as a boy. Off went the beautiful blonde curls, out went the years of dresses and leggings and in came the buzz cut, crew shirts and a pointedly deeper voice. She started binding her budding breasts, hiding her body in every capacity and refusing to swim. She often pointed at her genitals in hatred screaming to me that she wanted them to go away…to be forever banished from her ‘godforsaken body’. It would be 3 more years before I’d find out that it wasn’t because she was misgendered–it was because they were the gateway to her pain.
At 14, after months of self harm that landed us in the hospital and an endless stream of therapists, we finally found someone that she decided to open up to. The reason? She was UK-based and my daughter knew that she could talk to her and keep it on her terms. She’d done enough reading over the years to know that the second she disclosed to a teacher or therapist, child protective services and the government would step in. She’d learned that the experience would likely be a nightmare, many men would be involved in both the mental and physical forensic interviews and it was a crapshoot regarding their ability to protect her mental health or personal rights. She’s smart, so she’d also taken away that because she had not been under her abuser’s care for well over a year, her disclosure would come down to her word against his. When this is the case, 95% of the perpetrator’s get off the hook. My attorney confirmed it. The DA would likely not even take the case because there wasn’t enough proof and they ‘don’t like to take cases that they know that they’ll lose’.
So here we are 5 months later. It’s been a nightmare, but at least I’ve had the ability to keep her safe, away from him and focused on her healing–which will take years. She’s been out of school for months, hardly sleeps most nights and has days where she can barely function from the trauma she’s been through. But she’s brave and strong and slowly finding her footing. And she’s finally getting mad. Like really mad. Ready to take him on and tear him to pieces in public mad. This is progress. It means strength is building.
The horror of imagining a grown man doing what he did to my child–especially one that was supposed to love and protect her from all harm–is sometimes enough to make my brain want to explode. But to find out from my litany of research that 1 in 4 girls under 18 will experience sexual trauma like this is almost too much to bear. It’s a statistic so awful to comprehend, no one wants to really wants to know about it–which makes it incredibly hard to get the fundraising and media airtime to make it more public. Bring in the incest statistics and it’s even worse.
Enter June 23rd. The day our esteemed SCOTUS brings down their gavels and makes it known the no fetus should go unprotected. “God must protect the children”, they say, and all life should be honored, regardless of its inception.
I don’t need to belabor the many points already being made about this in other opinion pieces, but I do need to hone in on one. I may be just one mother, but I’m one of thousands globally that one day wake up to the fact that someone that they trusted hurt their child in the most evil of ways. To think that I could have become aware of this nightmare by my 10 year old becoming pregnant, then having no ability to terminate the pregnancy? It’s almost too much.
A child can not endure having a child. And children are, and will continue to be, molested in this country in shocking numbers. Every day.
Organizations like Keep Kids Safe are just now starting to make inroads addressing this, but the awareness and the reform is just beginning.
There is no way anyone can justify a child–or anyone for that matter–that’s been sexually abused having to further endure the trauma of pregnancy. To even imagine forcing them to follow through on a birth–potentially of a child created from incest–is an evil almost as vile as the original sin.
We are a normal family living in an urban city with a child that was educated about body safety within an inch of her life. I thought she had two loving people co-parenting peacefully, both supporting her future in every way possible. It was a lie, and we will forever be living in the aftermath–emotionally, financially and physically. But we will survive. And, until last week, at least we didn’t have to worry about the worst possible outcome. I literally shudder at what this can, and will, do to so many young lives.
Not allowing a woman to make her own reproductive choices is bad enough. But to include rape and incest is not protecting children–it is murdering the ones that need our protection most.
We were one of the lucky ones. We will all come to know families who are not. Please, don’t sit in silence on this matter. It’s real, it’s rampant and it needs every voice available to refuse to accept it. Please.
