Category Archives: child advocacy

Mastering Play Therapy

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My children are play therapists. They have a thriving community of small people who live and work together and hammer out the tough issues of life in community. These people are wiser and more together than most full-sized humans and I attribute this to my daughters’ wisdom and unfortunately, to the things they have endured in their young lives.

A short time after we found out they had been abused by their adopted brother, a story surfaced from their play world.

It is still very hard for me to face–Charles groomed the children by using their toys. He made some of them have sex. This idea was so awful to face or talk about that it took me awhile to get what the kids were telling me.

Two innocent little toys were robbed of their innocence. We had to do something. I staged a healing ceremony. We talked about the non-consensual nature of what had been done to them. I hoped it would help.

Now, years later, I have to say it helped the girl more than the boy. The girl has struggled to overcome what was done to her. She went from being a victim to a survivor. The boy, however, became a villain. I won’t go into all his crimes but he has done a lot of bad things. He can’t seem to change and he has left brokenness in his path.

My older daughter speaks of these things with both sadness and wisdom. She says that although she is not happy that F. has never turned things around, she knows he too was a victim of abuse.

I don’t have an answer for what F or any of us could do to change his villainy. Maybe when I do I will have mastered play therapy.

How to heal sexual abuse

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Imagine your child is the most beautiful baby in the world. Now imagine they are a beautiful toddler, then preschooler and then kindergartner.

(yes, I know your child is the most beautiful of all these things–this is why I wrote it that way– so you could empathize)

Imagine you homeschool because you enjoy time with your child so much. Imagine your child is both smart and good, charming and graceful and funny.

Now imagine you discover that your child has been sexually abused by someone they trusted. Someone you let be around your child. You trusted the abuser too.

When you find out that all this has happened before your child is 6, how will you feel? What will you do?

I can only tell you what I did. The first thing I did was grieve. I cried for at least a month. I cried for three years. I cried yesterday.

The next thing I did was ask how could I have missed it? The abuser was highly deceptive. Most are.

Then I stared right into the face of an awful list. On it were:

Acting out sexually
Academic problems
Bedwetting
Anger issues
Small cutting
Depression
Suicidal behavior
Poor hygiene
Gender identity crisis
Eating disorder
Low self esteem

Imagine you are the mother of the most beautiful child in the world and you do not want your child to struggle with the things on that list. You want healing.

I prayed and the answer I got was remarkably simple: the truth will set you free.

I had a hard time at first because of the list. I hated the idea that people would judge my child because of what had been done to her instead of seeing she was not those things.
She was just another 5 year old crime victim. Five year old rape victim.

You don’t get your head around that right away. Hurts too much.

But I began to tell our story. I used the language of the criminal code because what had been done was a crime.

As I told the story I found out one thing for sure: the list is wrong, really wrong.

How do I know? Because the vast majority of rape and child sexual abuse survivors never show up on the list, never reveal their stories.

They live quiet, normal, functioning lives with no predetermined set of symptoms from the list except the terrible loneliness and pain that comes with the betrayal of their innocence and the added weight of attempting to heal alone.

Why would they need to heal alone?
The list.
Who wants to have to deal with terrible pain of sexual abuse AND the stigma of that list?

Not me. I wouldn’t. But I have chosen to let the truth set me free and it has.

My beautiful child is no more at risk of the things on that list than any other child. In fact she is far less so.

Why?
Because she has me and I would swallow a world of pain, humiliation and prejudice before I would let her walk the road into adulthood alone.

In fact. I want to get rid of the list. It a terrible fiction.

Politics, truth and what really matters..

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So. I think of myself as one if the 100 most disenfranchised people in the United States. Why? Because I vote.
And because when I have contacted elected officials about our growing need to protect our children they tell me that protecting our children is not their issue

Let me rephrase that: local and national elected officials who have responded to my concern about protecting children from pedophiles have said they won’t help me because it is “not” their “issue”

I used to think it was everyone’s issue.

I keep thinking–this is an election year, shouldn’t someone care?

So the Akin thing forced me to study up on the politics and what I found was interesting.

Akin was wrong–really, really wrong, but to what end?

He was trying to save babies. He meets his political downfall because he crossed a line in trying to prevent murder, mass murder.

The ends do not justify the means. His strong desire to save babies from elective abortion does not make what he said right…

but a bit of contextualization never hurt anyone.

Rape is rape, but the strange wording and semantic crash for Akin came because he was trying to legally address something that is known, practiced and acknowledged in obstetrics–doctors can call a lot of things the way they want to. Many doctors are already allowing or referring for elective abortions to minimize their risk of law suits if parents deem their child imperfect.

Akin is 50 steps ahead of a 50 year old game, but what he was discussing when he got caught out was the notion that a baby would be valuable even if she were the child of a rapist or child molester.

Ironically, another recent flurry of outrage occurred over a pregnant teen in the DR who was not permitted to abort her fetus so she could receive cancer treatment.

I thought it was interesting that no one thought to question why a girl of 13 or 14 was pregnant and how old exactly was the father?

Akin was wrong and he will pay for his verbal gaffe. But we all pay an unacceptable price if we laugh at the “rape rape” without asking how we can help the young victims of rape by providing healing, safety, comfort, advocacy and a voice–not a brutal medical death to a second innocent child when the first has endured too much.

“the good beach”

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For a long time my name was Bitch. I will only write it once, hereafter I will use a placeholder, but it is important for me to acknowledge it just once.

My adopted daughter called me this regularly for years. Never without venom. It hurt to be called beach because of the venom. It hurt because she was saying I was not human, without value.

I suspected that my new nickname, like much of her other abusive behavior, was a reflection of her own struggles with identity. She said I was the beach, but struggled with who she was and how valuable she was.

She was valuable to me. I had sacrificed a great deal to be her beach, um… mom.

She is still valuable to me. I know she can be a pain in the grass, but she is my daughter. She is my daughter.

When someone treats her badly or dehumanizes her or devalues her. And let us be clear, those words themselves are placeholders for very bad things. People who should help her have done very bad things instead. Well, I may be a beach, but I want to stomp and yell and kick’em in the shins.

I want to say stop!! She is worth more than this!! She is my daughter.

I want to have a healing, undoing, potion for the harm done to her.

I do. It is a single name–Jesus. He became the beach for her, for me, for all of us to undo the undoable, to restore our lost and stolen value.

When she tells me what has happened to her I grieve and wish she would stop running from the one Man who raises the value of an ordinary beach like me.

He buys the field/finds the treasure/sets the captive free.

And instead of the rude name we have become accustomed to, He cups our faces in His hands and calls us by our eternal name–
Dear
Very Dear…

Famous?

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I am in a children’s museum feeling inadequate because I know that I had one primary goal in life: be a good mom. Even before I had kids I wanted to be a good mom in Sunday school, youth group, to my 50 year old Iranian student–good mom.

I will feel my inadequacy in my bones

It is not our fault we are deceived by predators.
It is our fault if we don’t provide the remedy.

The truth sets us free…

The substance of things

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She had been out of radio contact for awhile so I was glad when she called
She was in the hospital for all the usual stuff
I worry about the baby.

Give her my usual (inadequate) pep talks

Pray.

There are so many kinds of prayer–which we must remember, means talking to God.

There is easy prayer
Otherwise known as grace
There is harder prayer
Which involves some level of suspense
Like when will the baby or rain
Come?

And then there is the prayer you pray for a child lost at sea.

This prayer is only possible with miracles and men rising from the dead

It starts with a profession of faith
Something like…no one could do this but You

Or
You are a God of miracles…

Or (I admit)
God I have no idea whatsoever how you could do this but You can, only you can..

This last prayer is always a life and death matter

S.

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When S was little she loved Elmo. We did not get PBS on tv so we watched DVDs. I always associate Elmo with her babyhood.

The first time someone talked about her being “damaged goods” because she was a sexual assault survivor I was knocked back. In a country where women are paid and applauded for nudity, a little girl’s non-consensual abuse would make her “damaged goods?!”

Children are hurt, wounded, violated, and robbed by sexual abuse

But they are not damaged goods. Ever.

What damages us all most is when we hand the abuse of children over to the wolves and refuse to speak out and fight for the dignity and safety of every little girl who once loved Elmo.