In the United States one in four girls will be sexually abused before she turns eighteen. It’s reported there are 39 million survivors of sexual abuse in this country, and most will keep their experience hidden.
The impacts of sexual abuse and sexual assault on a person’s life can be far-reaching and insidious. According to womenofsubstance.org, the United States has the highest rate of sexual assault of any industrialized nation in the world, with an adult woman being raped every two minutes.
It’s reported that seventy to eighty percent of survivors of sexual abuse will use drugs and alcohol excessively, and research has shown that females who have been abused are more likely to suffer from eating disorders, confusion about their sexual identity, poor sex life and relations with men.
These are external signifiers of inner conditions of low self-esteem, guilt, shame, and self-consciousness that survivors of abuse will often feel. Mary Anne Cohen, the director of the New York Center for Eating Disorders, describes sexual abuse as being a violation of the boundaries of the self.
In the instance of a child experiencing abuse, the perpetrator gains power over his or her victim through the act of abuse, and the child, rendered helpless through a violation by someone in a more dominant position will often spend their lives recreating situations of helplessness, or try to excessively manipulate their external environments—such as their weight or appearance—in order to gain a feeling of control or power that was lost in their early years.
Ending Victimhood
But to refer to an abuse survivor as a ‘victim’ is to continually reaffirm that state. Paul Ferrini, in his book Wisdom of the Self’, believes that every instance of abuse is an opportunity for healing for both perpetrator and victim. His stance is that we all enter this world with a certain degree of inadequacy about who we are and that “our self-doubt attracts to us relationships in which that doubt can be made conscious and explicit.”
He claims that this is not to say a child can be in any way held responsible for acts of abuse against him or her, but that in order to heal she must own the experience because it happened to her. It happened so that she could heal deep-rooted pain and self-loathing within her, and provides her with the opportunity to learn forgiveness.
By re-framing her situation of pain as an opportunity to gain empowerment, she can then go on to empower others through her experience.
Ferrini elaborates by saying that “whatever hidden beliefs or assumptions we have about ourselves will be externalized in some way in our relationships. Everything that happens outside of us reflects an inner state.” Thus by recognizing our role as co-creators of our experience, however unpleasant that may seem, we acknowledge that we are nobody’s victim.
Forgiveness for Perpetrators of Abuse
Ferrini proposes that in order to find true healing we must throw out the model of the innocent and guilty. Situations of abuse come about from a shared motivation by both parties—the perpetrator is acting out from his own feelings of self-hatred. In order to truly forgive, Ferrini believes we have to come from a stance of equality and recognize that all of us have been a perpetrator at some point in our lives.
By recognizing the darkness in ourselves, only then can we begin to comprehend darkness in others and find compassion for their suffering. Releasing oneself from the burden of condemnation of another is one of the most self-empowering acts one can commit. By re-framing the concept of perpetrator and victim to one where we are all on an equal playing field learning from our individual experiences, we see that every experience is an opportunity for all sides to find greater wholeness and true healing within.
References:
Ferrini, Paul. Wisdom of the Self: Authentic Experience and the Journey to Wholeness, 1992.
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