Christine White was a preteen when she went on her first diet. At school, she was bubbly and outgoing, an honors student immersed in social causes. But at home, she would carefully ration her food.
By the time she was 14, she had developed bulimia. It was easier to hide the purging from her family than it was to explain why she wasn’t eating. In her darkest moments, she would scribble her anxieties into a blue-lined journal.
“When I eat food now I feel guilty,” she wrote in rounded, 14-year-old script. “I don’t like to eat in front of other people.”
As a college student, she stopped throwing up but kept overeating. Carbs were her crutch. “If I’m stressed, let me crawl inside a bag of Tostitos,” said White, who goes by her nickname, Cissy. She would shovel handfuls of cereal in her mouth, or boil and eat enormous amounts of pasta.
She didn’t fully understand what drove her binges, but she had one idea—an experience she referred to as “my hell” and “my secret” in later journals.
When White was an infant, her mother began dating a man 26 years her senior, and he lived with the family until White was 10. Though to outsiders he seemed affable, the stepfather was largely unemployed, according to White, and he had a boorish streak. “He was the kind of guy who would beep at pretty women walking down the street,” she said, “even with his kids in the car.”
At home, his immaturity had a sinister element, White said. A number of times, after White showered, he’d make her parade in front of him naked so he could “inspect” her. During games of Yahtzee, he would force her to sit on his lap for longer than was comfortable. He’d grab her behind and make flirtatious comments. Occasionally, he’d put a treat in his pocket and cajole her into fishing around for it.
“I knew that I didn’t like what was happening,” she said, “but I didn’t know what was appropriate.”
To her teen self, White’s body was criminal. “I felt like I was always in a battle with food,” she said. “I just thought, this body needs to be tamed. It makes terrible things happen.”
One analysis of 57,000 women found that those who experienced physical or sexual abuse as children were twice as likely to be addicted to food.
As horrifying as White’s story is, it’s a common one among people who have been abused as children. Researchers are increasingly finding that, in addition to leaving deep emotional scars, childhood sexual abuse often turns food into an obsession for its victims. Many, like White, become prone to binge-eating. Others willfully put on weight to desexualize, in the hope that what happened to them as children will never happen again.
In White’s case, overeating did not lead to obesity—her weight only ever ranged from roughly 118 pounds to 175. But research shows that in general, childhood sexual abuse might be an important predictor of obesity and overweight in adulthood. More importantly, experts say, this disturbing connection suggests it’s fruitless to treat eating-disordered patients without investigating and addressing potential childhood trauma first.
* * *
In 1985, a 28-year-old woman named Patty arrived at a weight-loss clinic in San Diego operated by Kaiser Permanente. The clinic was designed for people who were between 60 and 600 pounds overweight. Patty asked the doctor running the program, Vincent Felitti, for help. Patty weighed 408 pounds. In less than a year, she had shed 276 of them on a near-fasting diet.
“We thought, ‘Well, we’ve obviously got this problem licked,’” Felitti told me recently. “We’re going to be a world-famous department of preventive medicine here.”
Patty stayed at her svelte new weight for a few weeks. Then, in less than a month, she gained back 37 pounds—a feat that would require eating more than 4,000 excess calories daily. Patty blamed it on sleepwalking, saying that though she lived alone, she had been waking up in the mornings to a kitchen covered in opened boxes and cans.
Felitti believed her sleep-eating story, but he asked her, “Why did that start now? Why not five years ago? Why not 10 years from now?”
Patty said she didn’t know. When Felitti pressed her, she said there was a man at work who was much older and married. After she lost weight, he complimented and propositioned her.
Felitti countered that, though the sexual advances were understandably unpleasant, extreme weight-gain seemed like a strange response.
That’s when Patty revealed that her grandfather began raping her when she was 10.
In short order, Patty regained all of the weight and then some.
Patty’s story offered a clue into why nearly half of Felitti’s obesity patients dropped out of the weight-loss program. He interviewed more of these patients and found that 55 percent acknowledged some form of childhood sexual abuse. Like Patty, many would enter his program, slim down, then promptly bulk up again.
Together with Robert Anda at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Felitti would go on to run the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, which hunted for lingering impacts of difficult upbringings in the general population. The study generated a framework called the ACE Score, or the sum of all the types of trauma a person might have experienced in childhood—everything from their parents’ divorce, to poverty, to physical and sexual abuse.
Women said they felt more physically imposing when they were bigger. They felt their size helped ward off sexual advances from men.
The more ACEs a person has, the greater their risk of all sorts of maladies. Six ACEs increases the risk of injecting-drug abuse by 4600 percent, for example. Though some people develop resilience to early adversity, Felitti and Anda found that abuse victims’ ability to “bounce back” without treatment is markedly overstated.
“The things that don’t kill you can make you stronger,” Felitti said. But if they go unaddressed, they can also “get to a point where they become overwhelming and will destroy you.”
* * *
White’s stepfather moved out eventually, but he still made her wary whenever they interacted. His overtures ramped up as White lost weight in adolescence. He’d send her cards and tell her she should be a model. “That was just disgusting to me,” she said.
White’s stepfather has since passed away, but the distress he inflicted loomed over her early adult life. In 1985, when she was 18, she confessed to her journal that she was having trouble having intercourse with her boyfriend. “I’m so frigid,” she wrote.
She wouldn’t have a normal sex life until her early 40s. In college, she’d cry nearly every day and wake up with nightmares and flashbacks.
Experts say sexual abuse is one of the worst adverse experiences, and also one of the most likely to compound other life stressors.
“It’s bad to have a substance-abusing parent, or a mentally ill parent who’s untreated,” said Frank Putnam, a professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and another prominent childhood-adversity researcher. “Of all those [ACEs], sexual abuse seems to be the most pernicious. This is particularly true for women.”
“Sexual abuse is about betrayal,” he added. “It’s occurring at the hands of trusted family members and caregivers.”
Studies by Putnam and others have found that sexually abused women are more likely to suffer from an array of seemingly unrelated mental and physical ailments, including premature puberty and problems in school.
One 75-year-old former patient of Felitti’s, who saw him when she was in her 20s and weighed 270 pounds, said she began eating compulsively after a childhood of horrific sexual and emotional violence. (She and several other sources requested anonymity to protect family members and friends.) She now has a host of health problems, like bone problems and tumors in her brain and sciatic nerve, that she believes are related to her weight and mental anguish.
“It bothers you all your life,” the woman told me. “It decimates you as a human being.”
The trauma of sexual abuse often manifests through a preoccupation with food, dieting, and a drive to feel uncomfortably full. One analysis of 57,000 women in 2013 found that those who experienced physical or sexual abuse as children were twice as likely to be addicted to food than those who did not.
One Maryland woman who was a victim of incest at the hands of her father, uncle, and cousin would sometimes go for days without eating as a teen. Now that she’s in her 50s, the pattern has reversed, and she finds herself prone to binges. When at the airport, for example, she beelines for snack shops, buys two to three bags of M&Ms and a pack of Cheez-Its, and downs it all.
“I’m telling myself the whole time, ‘Why am I doing this?’” she said. “We still always carry this guilt around.”
Trauma that occurs during critical periods in the brain’s development can change its neurobiology, making it less responsive to rewards. This anhedonia—a deficit of positive emotions—more than doubles the likelihood that abused children will become clinically depressed adults. It also increases their risk of addiction. With their brains unable to produce a natural high, many adult victims of child abuse chase happiness in food. It’s this tendency, when combined with what many described as a desire to become less noticeable, that makes this group especially vulnerable to obesity.
Constance, a 53-year-old Virginia woman who also asked that I use a pseudonym, was fondled as a young girl by both an older cousin and her grandfather. A few years after the molestation ended, she was at a family function when she became so uncomfortable that she snuck off to a pantry and ate cookies until she felt sick.
“If you think of the body as a clever organism, if it’s exposed to something that’s threatening, it protects itself by making sure there are plenty of calories on board.”
In middle school, three neighborhood boys tricked her into coming over to their house. When she arrived, she said, they held her down and gang-raped her. For years, Constance didn’t tell anyone about the rape. Her weight spiked. When people weren’t looking, she would gorge on cookies, cakes, and chips. By the time she was a teenager, she weighed 180 pounds.
In high school, she turned to drinking and prescription pills, and later, she went to jail and rehab for a cocaine addiction. “When I was under the influence, I was able to come outside of myself,” she said. “I would talk and laugh.” Even after rehab, she struggled with a compulsive-shopping habit that ran up her credit cards.
Today, Constance is still overweight and lives alone. She’d like to find a partner, but she has doubts. “I’m never really quite comfortable or feel safe with men,” she said. “I’m a little afraid of them because I know what they can do.”
***
Compulsive overeating doesn’t always lead to obesity, but studies show that sexual-abuse victims are far more likely to be obese in adulthood. Research suggests childhood sexual abuse increases the odds of adult obesity by between 31 and 100 percent. One study found that about 8 percent of all cases of obesity, and 17 percent of “class three” severe obesity, can be attributed to some form of child abuse.
The reasons are both metabolic and psychological, both willful and subconscious. For many victims, the drivers of their obesity act in synergy, compounding each other, and they might change over time. One such pathway is inflammation: The major, unrelieved stress of abuse triggers the adrenal glands to pump out steroid-like hormones. One of these hormones, cortisol, not only affects the brain’s ability to plan things like diets, it also affects appetite, satiety, and metabolism.
And there’s some evidence that stress induces the body to squirrel away fat—a vestige of a time in human evolution when this would have been useful. Chronic stress also sparks the release of chemicals called pro-inflammatory cytokines, which prevent insulin from being taken up by the muscle cells. This is called insulin resistance, and it’s strongly correlated with obesity. “If you think of the body as a clever organism, if it’s exposed to something that’s threatening, it protects itself by making sure there are plenty of calories on board,” said Erik Hemmingsson, an associate professor of medicine at Karolinska University in Sweden.
Abuse victims might therefore become heavy even if they eat normal amounts. One 93-year-old woman, Helen McClure, has been obese for years, but she’s not quite sure why. She doesn’t have a problem with overeating, she says.
As a child, she thought the fact that her father occasionally massaged her genitals was “just a part of growing up.”
“I first realized how bad it was was when I was in junior high and we learned about how babies are born,” she said. “It shocked me.” By then, she weighed 200 pounds.
Many survivors, meanwhile, put on weight in order to protect against future abuse. Women I interviewed said they felt more physically imposing when they were bigger. They felt their size, rightly or wrongly, helped ward off sexual advances from men.
Patricia Borad, another of Felitti’s patients, said physical abuse was a daily part of her childhood. Her mother called her “jezebel”; her father would paddle her and her other siblings if only one of them did something wrong. When she was in her teens, her father refused her permission to go on a camping trip with her boyfriend’s family. When she asked him why, he backhanded her so hard she flew across the room.
“For that reason, I just grew up not being able to say ‘no’ to a man,” she said.
In adulthood, she was fine with the attention she drew from romantic prospects—whenever she was single. But if she was in a relationship, she’d put on weight so that other men would be less likely to flirt with her and try to lure her away from her partner. “If I didn’t want that extra attention from men,” she said, “it was much easier not to get it if I was overweight.”
Another survivor echoed her perspective: “Eating and getting big, I felt like nobody would notice me.”
People who have unexamined childhood trauma often fail when they attempt weight-loss treatments. Some studies show that patients with histories of abuse tend to lose less weight after bariatric surgery or during clinical weight-loss treatment. Among women who were hospitalized for psychiatric treatment after bariatric surgery, one study found that 73 percent had a history of childhood sexual abuse. Gastric bypass prevents them from eating large quantities—thereby removing an essential coping mechanism.
In Felitti’s weight-loss group, there was one woman, also a victim of abuse, who would come every week and sit silently with a smile on her face. One week, she announced that her family had finally scraped together the $20,000 necessary for her to have bariatric surgery.
“Well, this is going to be a disaster,” Felitti thought.
She lost 94 pounds, became suicidal, and was psychiatrically hospitalized five times the following year.
“The [weight] came off too quick,” she told him later. “I felt like I was losing my protective wall.
* * *
These women’s stories suggest that obesity is not what it seems. Given how it increases obesity risk, preventing child abuse could be considered a public-health measure on par with mandatory calorie labels. Doctors may tell overweight patients to diet and hit the gym, but if they’ve suffered childhood trauma, their bodies might be actively working against them. Worse still, the patient might—consciously or otherwise—have a dark reason for remaining heavy.
Felitti eventually incorporated a questionnaire that asks patients about sexual abuse and other childhood trauma into Kaiser Permanente’s Obesity Program. Several obesity-treatment specialists contacted for this story also said they routinely ask their patients about sexual abuse—most won’t mention it unless prompted.
Wendy Scinta, an obesity-medicine specialist in central New York, says the first question she asks patients who seek weight-loss treatment is, “Did you have a happy childhood?”
People who did will say so right away. Among those who didn’t, there’s usually a pause. A “hmmm.” A vague explanation. If the patient recalls abuse, Scinta might refer them to the psychologist she has on staff.
Some doctors say they struggle to secure insurance-plan payouts for the extensive psychological or psychiatric treatment that abuse survivors require. About half of psychiatrists don’t take insurance, and half of U.S. counties have no mental-health professionals. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services covers 16 to 22 visits per year for obesity-related medical counseling, but psychological therapy is not included.
“With people who are abused, you have to uncover their awful wounds before they get better,” said Marijane Hynes, an internist at the George Washington University Medical School in Washington who focuses on obesity. At her hospital, psychiatry residents see many of her patients for free, and she’s not sure how she would provide mental-health treatment without their help.
Some survivors find unorthodox routes to restoring mental and physical health. Later in her life, McClure, the 93-year-old abuse victim, began speaking regularly on abuse issues to groups of doctors, social workers, and police departments. The advocacy “has certainly dulled the pain and given me a sense of pride in the fact that I have been able to turn my disgusting story into a tool to help others,” she said.
White, the woman who documented her teenage dieting and bulimia in journals, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in her 20s. After suffering an anxiety attack, she called the health center at her college, which referred her to therapy. She would ride the bus to the therapist’s lily-white, immaculate office twice each week. “I used to refer to it as paid-for parenting,” said White, who is now 49 and living in Weymouth, Massachusetts.
The therapist was warm and welcoming. Eventually, though, White felt it wasn’t enough to simply talk about her emotions. Her abuse had left her feeling like an amputee, she said. Talk therapy was like retracing the question, “How do you feel about the fact that you can’t get up the stairs?” she said—when all she really wanted was a ramp.
In her 30s, she enrolled in a writing workshop. She and dozens of other people, many of them survivors of trauma, would sit in a room, compose essays about their pasts, and share their work with the group. At first, being open about her childhood felt awkward. But after each of the four sessions, White found herself feeling better for months.
It was around that same time that she began regularly practicing yoga. That, too, was fraught initially. For a survivor of sexual abuse, lying down in a dark room with strangers, as most yogis do at the end of a class, was scary. Gradually, though, the practice helped her once again feel safe in her skin.
Decades later, the days of seeing her body as tainted are finally over for White. She still believes she’ll be keenly sensitive to stress for the rest of her life. But now, when something triggers her—like her home flooding a few years ago—she turns to a relaxation technique called guided imagery to manage her symptoms. She’s become an advocate for abuse victims, and in 2014 she opened her own writing workshop.
She says the abuse will always tug at her, but today its power is diminished. “That’s just stuff that happened to you,” she said. “It isn’t you.”
Full article: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/12/sexual-abuse-victims-obesity/420186/
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2016-01-06 22:32:472016-01-06 22:32:47Olga Kahzan, The Second Assault, The Atlantic
Swimming coach Scott Volkers coached Julie Gilbert from about 1982 to 1986. Ms Gilbert told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that between the ages of 13 and 14 she was sexually assaulted by Volkers on a number of occasions. She gave evidence of the abuse occurring in a massage room and on another occasion in a caravan where Volkers lived. Two other women, Kylie Rogers and Simone Boyce, told similar stories.
Despite being removed from the Swimming Queensland Hall of Fame and being refused accreditation by Swimming Australia, Scott Volkers continues to coach swimming in Brazil.
Julie Gilbert writes exclusively for Mamamia about how she found the strength to tell her story and the faith she has that child sexual abusers will be brought to justice…
My story, like most victims of child sexual assault is not a pleasant one. It’s a story that requires you to disclose in detail the humiliating acts done to you as a child, using language that is often uncomfortable and embarrassing.
It’s also one that has to be told to complete strangers in hope they will believe you and treat your words with the sensitivity they deserve.
It’s really hard to do, because every time you describe those acts you relive the memories over and over again. You have to revisit those dark memories you have spent years learning how to suppress, all in the hope that someone will believe you and fight for you.
Many victims may ask why I would want to put myself through that. It is a question I have often asked myself. What have I personally got out of telling my story? For years I took the road of silence thinking that was the easier road to take. Silence, secrecy and shame are the child’s worst enemies and the paedophile’s best friends.
So I tied my secret up in a box and left it on a shelf thinking that I was dealing with it. But all it did was create destructive behaviours that impacted on my life for years. Years spent trying to create the perfect world all so I could feel safe. But I wasn’t safe, I was just avoiding.
Finally, after suffering years of trauma and an eating disorder, I decided to untie my box and let my secret out. It was not easy to do. And it certainly has been filled with disappointments, frustrations and anger, and the shedding of many tears.
I have realised however that the road filled with road blocks, potholes and rough edges is the one that has allowed me to recover. As the years have passed I have realised that finding my voice and telling my story is much more powerful than suffering all of those years in silence. And when you make your voice a part of your healing process, it is the moment you cease being a victim and you became a survivor.
And as a survivor I plan to continue to use my voice for all of those who are yet to find theirs. When they finally do, hopefully the path will be less rocky, because every victim who uses their voice makes the journey a little bit easier for the next.
The report released recently by the Royal Commission gives us our first glimmer of hope in more than a decade that allows us to press the DPP to restate the charges against Volkers.
Some may say it’s just another report, words on a paper but to me those words remind me of how strong we have become. How powerful our voices can be when we come together and tell our story.
So now it is up to the DPP to do their job and use their voice to make sure perpetrators are brought to justice.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has released a report about how the Queensland Academy of Sport, Swimming Australia and the Director of Public Prosecutions in Queensland and New South Wales dealt with the allegations against Scott Volkers. The Commission found that there were “inadequacies” in the way that these bodies dealt with the allegations. It is the hope of Ms Gilbert and other alleged victims of Mr Volkers that the DPP will reinstate the charges, so the charges can be explored fully by a court.
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2016-01-06 22:13:142016-01-06 22:13:14Julie Gilbert, Why I had to speak out about Scott Volkers, Mama Mia
Six men have sued the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, claiming church leaders concealed allegations that a priest sexually abused children for decades.
The suits, filed in November by men from Maine, New Hampshire and New York, were made public this week and accuse the diocese of covering up abuse by the Rev. James Vallely. The men say Vallely sexually abused them from 1958 to 1977 when they were ages 8 to 15.
Their lawyer, Mitchell Garabedian, said Tuesday that the suits claim the church “fraudulently concealed” Vallely’s abuse. Vallely died in 1997 in Florida.
The concealment claim opens the way to sue even though the statute of limitations for sexual abuse has expired. Garabedian said former Bishop Daniel Feeney, who led the diocese from 1955 until his death in 1969, knew Vallely abused minors but did nothing, allowing him to continue to abuse children.
The evidence that Feeney was aware of the abuse came from a letter revealed recently as part of a separate lawsuit that indicated the diocese knew about Vallely’s abuse in 1956, Garabedian said. The diocese had previously said it knew of credible allegations against Vallely going back only to 1977. Written in July 2005, the letter from one priest to another in the diocese says Feeney transferred Vallely to a different parish in 1956, shortly after learning of the sexual abuse allegations.
“I have no evidence indicating that Bishop Feeney warned the public to protect their children against Father Vallely,” said Garabedian, who brought the lawsuit against the Rev. John Geoghan that sparked the church abuse scandal in Boston more than a decade ago. “Father Vallelly was shuttled from parish to parish to parish, as were so many other abusers.”
Diocesan spokesman David Guthro said the diocese couldn’t comment on a pending lawsuit. The diocese’s lawyer, Gerald Petruccelli, said he got the complaints Tuesday morning and couldn’t immediately comment on the claims.
The suit is seeking unspecified monetary damages.
“What my clients are seeking is validation and a monetary award will be validation,” Garabedian said. “They want to regain self-esteem and self-respect.”
Full article: http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/lawsuits-portland-maine-diocese-hid-sex-abuse-priest-36102552
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2016-01-06 21:01:162016-01-06 21:01:16Associated Press, Lawsuits: Portland, Maine, Diocese Hid Sex Abuse by Priest, ABC News
The children of service members are victims in hundreds of incidents of sexual abuse each year, according to data the Defense Department provided exclusively to the Associated Press.
The abuse of military dependents is committed most often by male enlisted troops, the data show, followed by family members.
The figures offer greater insight into the sexual abuse of children committed by service members, a problem of uncertain scale due to a lack of transparency into the military’s legal proceedings. With more than 1 million military dependents, the number of cases appears statistically small. But for a profession that prides itself on honor and discipline, any episodes of abuse cast a pall.
Those numbers fall well-short of a full picture.
Ages of the offenders and victims, locations of the incidents and the branch of service that received the report of sexual abuse were omitted. The Defense Department said in a statement that “information that could unintentionally uniquely identify victims was withheld from release to eliminate possible ‘re-victimization’ of the innocent.”
It’s also unclear how many of the incidents resulted in legal action. The cases represent substantiated occurrences of child sexual abuse reported to the Defense Department’s Family Advocacy Program, which does not track judicial proceedings, the department said.
An AP investigation published in November found more inmates are in military prisons for child sex crimes than for any other offense. But the military’s opaque justice system keeps the public from knowing the full extent of their crimes or how much time they spend behind bars.
Responding to AP’s findings, three Democratic senators have urged Defense Secretary Ash Carter to lift what they called the military justice system’s “cloak of secrecy” and make records from sex crimes trials readily accessible.
The senators also raised another concern. Cases involving children are not included in the Defense Department’s annual report to Congress on sexual assaults, which focuses primarily on adult-on-adult incidents, they said. The senators — Barbara Boxer of California, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii — told Carter in a Dec. 8 letter they are concerned the department may be underestimating how many sexual assaults are occurring in the military.
There were at least 1,584 substantiated cases of military dependents being sexually abused between fiscal years 2010 and 2014, according to the data. Enlisted service members sexually abused children in 840 cases. Family members of the victims accounted for the second largest category with 332 cases.
Most of the enlisted offenders were males whose ranks ranged between E-4 and E-6. In the Marine Corps and Army, for example, those troops are corporals, sergeants and staff sergeants. Officers were involved in 49 of the cases. The victims were overwhelmingly female.
Kathy Robertson, manager of the Family Advocacy Program, said in an emailed response to questions that the incident rates reflect the U.S. military’s demographics. Most of the cases involve the E-4 and E-6 ranks because they are the largest number of active-duty personnel and the largest number of parents in themilitary, she said.
Duplications in the data indicate as many as 160 additional cases of sexual abuse could have occurred during the 2010 to 2014 period, involving a child who was victimized multiple times or a repeat abuser. The figures also account only for cases involving military dependents, which are the only child victims the department tracks.
Guest post: “We must have the courage to face child sexual abuse”
“The latest report from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner is heartbreaking – but it must also be our wake-up call, says broadcaster Tazeen Ahmad.
The number one question I’ve been asked since my BBC2 investigation ‘The Truth about Child Sex Abuse’ aired is this: “How do I talk to my kids about something this dreadful?”
Over the past several months I’ve been working with the BBC to investigate child sex abuse in the UK, using the findings from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner’s latest report. I’ve been reporting on this crime for over five years, but even so, I was shocked by the scale of it. According to the OCC, between 2012 and 2014:
• 425,000 children (equivalent to one in every UK classroom) were sexually abused
• there were fewer than 6,500 convictions
• of those who were abused, only one in eight reported it
• in three out of four cases, no criminal charges were brought
• two-thirds of victims were abused by someone in their family, or someone they knew through their family
The statistics tell a clear story, but it’s not one we want to hear. The greatest risk to our children isn’t stranger danger. Nor is it gang grooming or high-profile abusers. The biggest risk lies closer to home. We thought that if we kept our kids off the streets and told them not to talk to strangers, we could keep them safe. But how do we protect them from the unknown enemy within, people they may like and trust: neighbours, family friends, the nanny, babysitter or au pair? Or even people we love or trust: their uncle, stepdad, grandfather? Their father?
MOSAC, a remarkable charity that has worked for over 21 years with the parents and carers of sexually abused children, has long known where these crimes take place and by whom they’re committed. They say it generally happens in or around the family environment, carried out by someone the child knows. Our own investigations bore this out: we spoke to several young people who’d been abused by a close family member: fathers, stepfathers, family friends; even, in one instance, a mother.
Educating children offers one answer, but it’s only half the battle. It’s grossly irresponsible to place the burden on a traumatised and terrified child to report abuse.
If anything good came out of the vile crimes of Jimmy Savile et al, and the child sexual exploitation stories that I’ve often reported myself, it’s that tough, unpalatable discussions are now taking place in the public domain. The next step is to find a way to share that discussion, difficult as it is, with our children. The NSPCC’s Underwear Rule Campaign offers brilliant tips on teaching children about their privacy and explaining abuse. This discussion needs to extend into schools across the country too.
During an interview to publicise the film, I was asked: “Why don’t children report this crime?” The truth is that a child who is scared and has been intensively groomed will be confused, traumatised and unsure of where to turn. They may feel guilty, be afraid their family will split up as a result of their speaking out, or be trying to protect themselves or their non-abusing loved ones. They may have been manipulated into distrusting everyone, or not have found an opportunity to tell. Children also often don’t know what’s permissible and what isn’t, in the way that adults do. The reasons are complex and countless. Abusers know all of this, and they exploit it.
So educating children offers one answer, but it’s only half the battle. It’s grossly irresponsible to place the burden on a traumatised and terrified child to report abuse. After all, a baby or very young child cannot carry this responsibility. We need to look at what more we adults can do to identify, investigate and prosecute this crime. One thing’s clear: our disclosure-based legal system isn’t working. “We have to change the system, we have to change our approach,” said Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner. How a child takes on their adult abuser legally is a pressing matter for our criminal justice system to address.
One sign of hope comes from the internet, which while arguably part of the problem, also offers a solution. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) told me that child sex abuse images shared on the internet provide vital clues; last year it helped them locate and save a hundred children from further abuse. Those images can also provide much-needed corroboration when someone is arrested on child abuse charges. If police seize technological devices – phones, cameras, laptops – when they make an arrest, it could provide crucial evidence to back up a child’s claim. This needs to be mandatory for police forces around the country. Our criminal justice system evidently has a lot of work to do.
For the rest of us, the first step is to educate ourselves and our children. We also need to look out for signs and symptoms of abuse, because children often don’t use words. Extreme bedwetting, withdrawal, inexplicable anger, self-harm and behavioural changes are just some of the indicators – though these can, of course, be the symptoms of development stages or other anxieties. One key piece of advice: listen to your gut.
The figures, heartbreaking and horrific, are a wake-up call; we are letting our children down. We can take steps to identify and protect against these terrible crimes, but first we need the courage to face them.
Full article: http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/guest_posts/a2520658-Guest-post-We-must-have-the-courage-to-face-child-sexual-abuse
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2016-01-05 04:27:072016-01-05 04:27:07Tazeen Ahmad, Guest post: "We must have the courage to face child sexual abuse", Mumsnet
There are scores of us. Most of us silent. Most of us not wanting our names uttered aloud, thrown around like dice or like darts. Not wanting to reawaken this sleeping giant of a trauma. We have moved on, after all. And what good would it do anyway?
But what if it could? Do good, that is.
Protect some girl.
Protect some woman. Some student. Some unsuspecting soul.
What if writing my story of abuse could save someone else from having to write theirs?
Tonight is New Years Eve, the night we got married nearly two decades ago.
Sharing this chronicle is my anti-anniversary present – to myself. To use, hopefully for the good, something that was so bad.
I share it with a prayer for all the other victims. The silent ones, the screaming ones.
Praying for my abusive ex
May 1996: (Age 21) Please God, there is this man, a Rabbi, no less. He is quite simply the most dynamic drop-dead kosher sexy rock-star Rabbi I have ever met. He just quoted Nietzsche, Jerry Garcia and Rebbe Nachman in one class. AND he’s single. Okay, he’s been married….Twice. With 3 kids. And he’s 15 years older than me…But….he’s perfect. He’s brilliant. And I like him. I mean, I really like him. God, please, let him like me.
September 1998: Thank you thank you thank you God. It happened. He likes me. In fact, he loves me. He asked me to marry him! And after only 4 months of dating. He says once we’re married then finally he will be accepted in the Orthodox world again. Once we are married his enemies will stop hounding him. Once we are married I can help him become the great man he is destined to be.
December 1998: Please God give me guidance. Just heard from a concerned friend that he slept with one of his old girlfriends while I was out of town. And others have come up to me warning me about him. Saying the most awful things. The.most.awful.things. He insists they are mere spiteful rumors. He’s done teshuva. For me. I can help him be a better man. Please God give me guidance. The wedding is in 3 weeks…
July 1999: Please God give me strength. I am working so hard, but I need to work harder. My holy husband and I are sculpting this glorious vision — of Jewish Renaissance, of reconnecting people to Israel, to their souls. I am swamped with research, book-writing, hosting, cooking, cleaning, flyers, gigs. Giving everything I’ve got to move this mission forward. He says I have a rosh-katan — a small head. I need to see the big picture and work harder. Help me to help him…
June 2001: Dear God, life is thrilling. He has a television show. His book is a best seller. I poured my soul into writing it with him and look what an impact it has had. But the more things grow, the more the work grows. The more his temper grows. He berates me daily. Whenever I neglect to tell people about his accomplishments he accuses me of being unsupportive & selfish. I forget an email and he explodes into a rage. Yelling relentlessly, shoving things. He pulled out a chair from under me. He rants until I crawl up into a small ball on the bed and weep. Please God help me learn how to handle his rages. Help me to be a better wife. Please…
January 2002: Dear God, I’m confused. He has this “teaching partner”. He spends all of his time with her. I don’t like the energy between them. I have pleaded with him to stop working with her. He refuses. Claims I am being jealous, needy. I asked if they are having an affair. He went off into a loud round of denial. Says I am insecure, delusional. Please God, help me stop being so jealous, so sad, so needy.
Oxford, May 2003: Please God, help me. I am sick….often. I am having these migraine headaches. My skull is exploding. I can’t breathe. My chest is sealed shut. I am a shell. When I go outside people come up to me rambling about how my husband is sleeping with this woman who comes to his classes. He promises me it’s all lies. All I know is that I am hurting God. Physically, emotionally, mentally. I am not well. Please God let these headaches end.
March 2004: Please God, give me guidance. He admitted to the Oxford affair. Finally. Promises me it was just this one, it will never happen again. Promises me it will be different now. We have Bayit Chadash – this beautiful spiritual center by the ocean. We have built this precious community of students. I have invested all of myself into nurturing this mission. It would all fall to pieces if I left. Please God give me clarity.
October 2004: Please God, just keep him away from me. I made the cut. Left Israel. Left the Center. Left him. Got a quiet get of divorce. He’s begging me to keep it a secret. There’s another damning article coming out against him. He insists that if I share that we are divorced, then all that we worked so hard to build will be destroyed. Fine, this one last thing. Just please let him stop barraging me with those long pleading emails. Keep him away from me.
October 2005: Please God, keep this going. This feels good, this being on my own. I am loving California. It’s like a therapeutic post-divorce Xanadu. I am breathing again. I am me. My eyes have been opened to the madness of these past seven years. I am no longer keeping his secrets. No longer doubting my own senses. I see my own wounds, my shadow, my poor choices. Dear God, at least let me help other women lest they end up like I did.
May 2006: Thank you God, the truth is finally out. And big. A group of women from Bayit Chadash finally got together. They have gone to the police. Finally speaking out loud and clear about how this charlatan is a predator. A manipulator. A sociopath. A danger. Finally I am getting confirmation of the many, unbelievably many affairs he had while married to me. From the “teaching partner” to the millionaire funder to this student and that student and another. He has fled the country…ousted from the Jewish world. Finally and entirely. Thank you God, he won’t be able to hurt any more women. Never again.
Jan. 2007: Please God help me to prioritize the right things in a partner this time. I don’t want an external “success story” that dissolves into dismal failure. I don’t want fame. I want an honest man, with integrity, with depth. A man who can communicate, who can empathize. A man to raise children with. I think I found him. Please God help me to value the gold, not the glitter.
May 2009: Thank you God for this good man, this mensch I have married. He is grounded. He is a loving father. Our house is stable and THIS is sacred. We talk about our feelings. We work through our challenges. We learn together. We work together. He lets me be myself. I let me be myself. Please God just stop the nightmares. The ones where my ex is back in my bed. With his hands on my neck. Why does he continue to assault me in my dreams?
October 2011: Dear God, a new crop of victims have emerged…again. Same stories, new cities. Abusing power, abusing women. Now in the New Age world. God help them. Please protect those easily-beguiled souls. Like me. The ones “consensually” seduced by his badgering brilliance. Protect the ones who only want to see the light, who deny the darkness until they are its easiest prey. Help them do their due diligence. Let their leaders see through the “brilliance” to the rot beneath.
Dec 25, 2015: Dear God, I have just read this New York Time article. About him and his latest lunge to power. The sick tale retold, again, decades later. How can it be that there is zero condemnation in this spineless article? Just quotes of excuse from high-power supporters. Just the last word given to the abuser. Just another free pass to the genius caught with his pants down. I am furious for the bruised dozens of victims. Furious for my nightmares that still won’t end. Please God protect us from the smiling sociopaths whose hands drip with candy.
Dec 31, 2015: Age 41 – Please God, help MG undo himself. Let his inner demon loosen his grip. Let it end already. For the sake of his victims, past and future, for the sake of his own broken inner-innocence.
For the sake of that sprite of a child I saw glimpses of way back when, in old family photos. The one with a broken home. The one who inherited the Holocaust in his bones. Before all the mania, the masochism, before the sex addiction set in. Please God help that shivering boy escape all this.
And help the rest of us – his victims, his critics, and even his hoodwinked supporters. We have all failed. We failed by praising his genius while ignoring his demons. We failed by giving him free passes instead of limited access. We were blinded by the lime-lit glitz of his wit, his intelligence. We failed by upholding societal standards of “success” that are simply cancerous. We failed by honoring the powerful while silencing the victims.
It is exactly twenty years since I uttered my first prayer for this man. We were married on New Year’s Eve, the very day I share this.
May the circle be full and finished now.
Putting this two-decade chronicle into print is a risk for me.
Everyone who cares about me is begging me to just “Keep quiet”.
And yet I can’t. So, in honor of them, I leave out my name.
But in honor of the victims I share my story.
Yes, there is a risk to writing this “aloud.” But there is also a risk to staying silent, staying safe. Twenty years and untold numbers of victims later, I have learned that staying safe can also be risky business.
One last prayer
So this final prayer, I type aloud. And may it be all the better heard, heeded and answered because it has been shared:
Dear God, may this man’s access end. May his abuses be made impossible because of the diligent campaigns of protest being launched right now. May the lessons be learned. May the victims know healing. May the nightmares end.
Full article: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/from-one-gafni-victim/
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2016-01-01 23:15:382016-01-01 23:15:38A voice for Gafni’s victims, from one who was there, The Times of Israel
Olga Kahzan, The Second Assault, The Atlantic
/in Uncategorized /by SOL ReformChristine White was a preteen when she went on her first diet. At school, she was bubbly and outgoing, an honors student immersed in social causes. But at home, she would carefully ration her food.
By the time she was 14, she had developed bulimia. It was easier to hide the purging from her family than it was to explain why she wasn’t eating. In her darkest moments, she would scribble her anxieties into a blue-lined journal.
“When I eat food now I feel guilty,” she wrote in rounded, 14-year-old script. “I don’t like to eat in front of other people.”
As a college student, she stopped throwing up but kept overeating. Carbs were her crutch. “If I’m stressed, let me crawl inside a bag of Tostitos,” said White, who goes by her nickname, Cissy. She would shovel handfuls of cereal in her mouth, or boil and eat enormous amounts of pasta.
She didn’t fully understand what drove her binges, but she had one idea—an experience she referred to as “my hell” and “my secret” in later journals.
When White was an infant, her mother began dating a man 26 years her senior, and he lived with the family until White was 10. Though to outsiders he seemed affable, the stepfather was largely unemployed, according to White, and he had a boorish streak. “He was the kind of guy who would beep at pretty women walking down the street,” she said, “even with his kids in the car.”
At home, his immaturity had a sinister element, White said. A number of times, after White showered, he’d make her parade in front of him naked so he could “inspect” her. During games of Yahtzee, he would force her to sit on his lap for longer than was comfortable. He’d grab her behind and make flirtatious comments. Occasionally, he’d put a treat in his pocket and cajole her into fishing around for it.
“I knew that I didn’t like what was happening,” she said, “but I didn’t know what was appropriate.”
To her teen self, White’s body was criminal. “I felt like I was always in a battle with food,” she said. “I just thought, this body needs to be tamed. It makes terrible things happen.”
One analysis of 57,000 women found that those who experienced physical or sexual abuse as children were twice as likely to be addicted to food.
As horrifying as White’s story is, it’s a common one among people who have been abused as children. Researchers are increasingly finding that, in addition to leaving deep emotional scars, childhood sexual abuse often turns food into an obsession for its victims. Many, like White, become prone to binge-eating. Others willfully put on weight to desexualize, in the hope that what happened to them as children will never happen again.
In White’s case, overeating did not lead to obesity—her weight only ever ranged from roughly 118 pounds to 175. But research shows that in general, childhood sexual abuse might be an important predictor of obesity and overweight in adulthood. More importantly, experts say, this disturbing connection suggests it’s fruitless to treat eating-disordered patients without investigating and addressing potential childhood trauma first.
* * *
In 1985, a 28-year-old woman named Patty arrived at a weight-loss clinic in San Diego operated by Kaiser Permanente. The clinic was designed for people who were between 60 and 600 pounds overweight. Patty asked the doctor running the program, Vincent Felitti, for help. Patty weighed 408 pounds. In less than a year, she had shed 276 of them on a near-fasting diet.
“We thought, ‘Well, we’ve obviously got this problem licked,’” Felitti told me recently. “We’re going to be a world-famous department of preventive medicine here.”
Patty stayed at her svelte new weight for a few weeks. Then, in less than a month, she gained back 37 pounds—a feat that would require eating more than 4,000 excess calories daily. Patty blamed it on sleepwalking, saying that though she lived alone, she had been waking up in the mornings to a kitchen covered in opened boxes and cans.
Felitti believed her sleep-eating story, but he asked her, “Why did that start now? Why not five years ago? Why not 10 years from now?”
Patty said she didn’t know. When Felitti pressed her, she said there was a man at work who was much older and married. After she lost weight, he complimented and propositioned her.
Felitti countered that, though the sexual advances were understandably unpleasant, extreme weight-gain seemed like a strange response.
That’s when Patty revealed that her grandfather began raping her when she was 10.
In short order, Patty regained all of the weight and then some.
Patty’s story offered a clue into why nearly half of Felitti’s obesity patients dropped out of the weight-loss program. He interviewed more of these patients and found that 55 percent acknowledged some form of childhood sexual abuse. Like Patty, many would enter his program, slim down, then promptly bulk up again.
Together with Robert Anda at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Felitti would go on to run the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, which hunted for lingering impacts of difficult upbringings in the general population. The study generated a framework called the ACE Score, or the sum of all the types of trauma a person might have experienced in childhood—everything from their parents’ divorce, to poverty, to physical and sexual abuse.
Women said they felt more physically imposing when they were bigger. They felt their size helped ward off sexual advances from men.
The more ACEs a person has, the greater their risk of all sorts of maladies. Six ACEs increases the risk of injecting-drug abuse by 4600 percent, for example. Though some people develop resilience to early adversity, Felitti and Anda found that abuse victims’ ability to “bounce back” without treatment is markedly overstated.
“The things that don’t kill you can make you stronger,” Felitti said. But if they go unaddressed, they can also “get to a point where they become overwhelming and will destroy you.”
* * *
White’s stepfather moved out eventually, but he still made her wary whenever they interacted. His overtures ramped up as White lost weight in adolescence. He’d send her cards and tell her she should be a model. “That was just disgusting to me,” she said.
White’s stepfather has since passed away, but the distress he inflicted loomed over her early adult life. In 1985, when she was 18, she confessed to her journal that she was having trouble having intercourse with her boyfriend. “I’m so frigid,” she wrote.
She wouldn’t have a normal sex life until her early 40s. In college, she’d cry nearly every day and wake up with nightmares and flashbacks.
Experts say sexual abuse is one of the worst adverse experiences, and also one of the most likely to compound other life stressors.
“It’s bad to have a substance-abusing parent, or a mentally ill parent who’s untreated,” said Frank Putnam, a professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and another prominent childhood-adversity researcher. “Of all those [ACEs], sexual abuse seems to be the most pernicious. This is particularly true for women.”
“Sexual abuse is about betrayal,” he added. “It’s occurring at the hands of trusted family members and caregivers.”
Studies by Putnam and others have found that sexually abused women are more likely to suffer from an array of seemingly unrelated mental and physical ailments, including premature puberty and problems in school.
One 75-year-old former patient of Felitti’s, who saw him when she was in her 20s and weighed 270 pounds, said she began eating compulsively after a childhood of horrific sexual and emotional violence. (She and several other sources requested anonymity to protect family members and friends.) She now has a host of health problems, like bone problems and tumors in her brain and sciatic nerve, that she believes are related to her weight and mental anguish.
“It bothers you all your life,” the woman told me. “It decimates you as a human being.”
The trauma of sexual abuse often manifests through a preoccupation with food, dieting, and a drive to feel uncomfortably full. One analysis of 57,000 women in 2013 found that those who experienced physical or sexual abuse as children were twice as likely to be addicted to food than those who did not.
One Maryland woman who was a victim of incest at the hands of her father, uncle, and cousin would sometimes go for days without eating as a teen. Now that she’s in her 50s, the pattern has reversed, and she finds herself prone to binges. When at the airport, for example, she beelines for snack shops, buys two to three bags of M&Ms and a pack of Cheez-Its, and downs it all.
“I’m telling myself the whole time, ‘Why am I doing this?’” she said. “We still always carry this guilt around.”
Trauma that occurs during critical periods in the brain’s development can change its neurobiology, making it less responsive to rewards. This anhedonia—a deficit of positive emotions—more than doubles the likelihood that abused children will become clinically depressed adults. It also increases their risk of addiction. With their brains unable to produce a natural high, many adult victims of child abuse chase happiness in food. It’s this tendency, when combined with what many described as a desire to become less noticeable, that makes this group especially vulnerable to obesity.
Constance, a 53-year-old Virginia woman who also asked that I use a pseudonym, was fondled as a young girl by both an older cousin and her grandfather. A few years after the molestation ended, she was at a family function when she became so uncomfortable that she snuck off to a pantry and ate cookies until she felt sick.
“If you think of the body as a clever organism, if it’s exposed to something that’s threatening, it protects itself by making sure there are plenty of calories on board.”
In middle school, three neighborhood boys tricked her into coming over to their house. When she arrived, she said, they held her down and gang-raped her. For years, Constance didn’t tell anyone about the rape. Her weight spiked. When people weren’t looking, she would gorge on cookies, cakes, and chips. By the time she was a teenager, she weighed 180 pounds.
In high school, she turned to drinking and prescription pills, and later, she went to jail and rehab for a cocaine addiction. “When I was under the influence, I was able to come outside of myself,” she said. “I would talk and laugh.” Even after rehab, she struggled with a compulsive-shopping habit that ran up her credit cards.
Today, Constance is still overweight and lives alone. She’d like to find a partner, but she has doubts. “I’m never really quite comfortable or feel safe with men,” she said. “I’m a little afraid of them because I know what they can do.”
***
Compulsive overeating doesn’t always lead to obesity, but studies show that sexual-abuse victims are far more likely to be obese in adulthood. Research suggests childhood sexual abuse increases the odds of adult obesity by between 31 and 100 percent. One study found that about 8 percent of all cases of obesity, and 17 percent of “class three” severe obesity, can be attributed to some form of child abuse.
The reasons are both metabolic and psychological, both willful and subconscious. For many victims, the drivers of their obesity act in synergy, compounding each other, and they might change over time. One such pathway is inflammation: The major, unrelieved stress of abuse triggers the adrenal glands to pump out steroid-like hormones. One of these hormones, cortisol, not only affects the brain’s ability to plan things like diets, it also affects appetite, satiety, and metabolism.
And there’s some evidence that stress induces the body to squirrel away fat—a vestige of a time in human evolution when this would have been useful. Chronic stress also sparks the release of chemicals called pro-inflammatory cytokines, which prevent insulin from being taken up by the muscle cells. This is called insulin resistance, and it’s strongly correlated with obesity. “If you think of the body as a clever organism, if it’s exposed to something that’s threatening, it protects itself by making sure there are plenty of calories on board,” said Erik Hemmingsson, an associate professor of medicine at Karolinska University in Sweden.
Abuse victims might therefore become heavy even if they eat normal amounts. One 93-year-old woman, Helen McClure, has been obese for years, but she’s not quite sure why. She doesn’t have a problem with overeating, she says.
As a child, she thought the fact that her father occasionally massaged her genitals was “just a part of growing up.”
“I first realized how bad it was was when I was in junior high and we learned about how babies are born,” she said. “It shocked me.” By then, she weighed 200 pounds.
Many survivors, meanwhile, put on weight in order to protect against future abuse. Women I interviewed said they felt more physically imposing when they were bigger. They felt their size, rightly or wrongly, helped ward off sexual advances from men.
Patricia Borad, another of Felitti’s patients, said physical abuse was a daily part of her childhood. Her mother called her “jezebel”; her father would paddle her and her other siblings if only one of them did something wrong. When she was in her teens, her father refused her permission to go on a camping trip with her boyfriend’s family. When she asked him why, he backhanded her so hard she flew across the room.
“For that reason, I just grew up not being able to say ‘no’ to a man,” she said.
In adulthood, she was fine with the attention she drew from romantic prospects—whenever she was single. But if she was in a relationship, she’d put on weight so that other men would be less likely to flirt with her and try to lure her away from her partner. “If I didn’t want that extra attention from men,” she said, “it was much easier not to get it if I was overweight.”
Another survivor echoed her perspective: “Eating and getting big, I felt like nobody would notice me.”
People who have unexamined childhood trauma often fail when they attempt weight-loss treatments. Some studies show that patients with histories of abuse tend to lose less weight after bariatric surgery or during clinical weight-loss treatment. Among women who were hospitalized for psychiatric treatment after bariatric surgery, one study found that 73 percent had a history of childhood sexual abuse. Gastric bypass prevents them from eating large quantities—thereby removing an essential coping mechanism.
In Felitti’s weight-loss group, there was one woman, also a victim of abuse, who would come every week and sit silently with a smile on her face. One week, she announced that her family had finally scraped together the $20,000 necessary for her to have bariatric surgery.
“Well, this is going to be a disaster,” Felitti thought.
She lost 94 pounds, became suicidal, and was psychiatrically hospitalized five times the following year.
“The [weight] came off too quick,” she told him later. “I felt like I was losing my protective wall.
* * *
These women’s stories suggest that obesity is not what it seems. Given how it increases obesity risk, preventing child abuse could be considered a public-health measure on par with mandatory calorie labels. Doctors may tell overweight patients to diet and hit the gym, but if they’ve suffered childhood trauma, their bodies might be actively working against them. Worse still, the patient might—consciously or otherwise—have a dark reason for remaining heavy.
Felitti eventually incorporated a questionnaire that asks patients about sexual abuse and other childhood trauma into Kaiser Permanente’s Obesity Program. Several obesity-treatment specialists contacted for this story also said they routinely ask their patients about sexual abuse—most won’t mention it unless prompted.
Wendy Scinta, an obesity-medicine specialist in central New York, says the first question she asks patients who seek weight-loss treatment is, “Did you have a happy childhood?”
People who did will say so right away. Among those who didn’t, there’s usually a pause. A “hmmm.” A vague explanation. If the patient recalls abuse, Scinta might refer them to the psychologist she has on staff.
Some doctors say they struggle to secure insurance-plan payouts for the extensive psychological or psychiatric treatment that abuse survivors require. About half of psychiatrists don’t take insurance, and half of U.S. counties have no mental-health professionals. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services covers 16 to 22 visits per year for obesity-related medical counseling, but psychological therapy is not included.
“With people who are abused, you have to uncover their awful wounds before they get better,” said Marijane Hynes, an internist at the George Washington University Medical School in Washington who focuses on obesity. At her hospital, psychiatry residents see many of her patients for free, and she’s not sure how she would provide mental-health treatment without their help.
Some survivors find unorthodox routes to restoring mental and physical health. Later in her life, McClure, the 93-year-old abuse victim, began speaking regularly on abuse issues to groups of doctors, social workers, and police departments. The advocacy “has certainly dulled the pain and given me a sense of pride in the fact that I have been able to turn my disgusting story into a tool to help others,” she said.
White, the woman who documented her teenage dieting and bulimia in journals, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in her 20s. After suffering an anxiety attack, she called the health center at her college, which referred her to therapy. She would ride the bus to the therapist’s lily-white, immaculate office twice each week. “I used to refer to it as paid-for parenting,” said White, who is now 49 and living in Weymouth, Massachusetts.
The therapist was warm and welcoming. Eventually, though, White felt it wasn’t enough to simply talk about her emotions. Her abuse had left her feeling like an amputee, she said. Talk therapy was like retracing the question, “How do you feel about the fact that you can’t get up the stairs?” she said—when all she really wanted was a ramp.
In her 30s, she enrolled in a writing workshop. She and dozens of other people, many of them survivors of trauma, would sit in a room, compose essays about their pasts, and share their work with the group. At first, being open about her childhood felt awkward. But after each of the four sessions, White found herself feeling better for months.
It was around that same time that she began regularly practicing yoga. That, too, was fraught initially. For a survivor of sexual abuse, lying down in a dark room with strangers, as most yogis do at the end of a class, was scary. Gradually, though, the practice helped her once again feel safe in her skin.
Decades later, the days of seeing her body as tainted are finally over for White. She still believes she’ll be keenly sensitive to stress for the rest of her life. But now, when something triggers her—like her home flooding a few years ago—she turns to a relaxation technique called guided imagery to manage her symptoms. She’s become an advocate for abuse victims, and in 2014 she opened her own writing workshop.
She says the abuse will always tug at her, but today its power is diminished. “That’s just stuff that happened to you,” she said. “It isn’t you.”
Full article: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/12/sexual-abuse-victims-obesity/420186/
Julie Gilbert, Why I had to speak out about Scott Volkers, Mama Mia
/in Uncategorized /by SOL ReformSwimming coach Scott Volkers coached Julie Gilbert from about 1982 to 1986. Ms Gilbert told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that between the ages of 13 and 14 she was sexually assaulted by Volkers on a number of occasions. She gave evidence of the abuse occurring in a massage room and on another occasion in a caravan where Volkers lived. Two other women, Kylie Rogers and Simone Boyce, told similar stories.
Despite being removed from the Swimming Queensland Hall of Fame and being refused accreditation by Swimming Australia, Scott Volkers continues to coach swimming in Brazil.
Julie Gilbert writes exclusively for Mamamia about how she found the strength to tell her story and the faith she has that child sexual abusers will be brought to justice…
My story, like most victims of child sexual assault is not a pleasant one. It’s a story that requires you to disclose in detail the humiliating acts done to you as a child, using language that is often uncomfortable and embarrassing.
It’s also one that has to be told to complete strangers in hope they will believe you and treat your words with the sensitivity they deserve.
It’s really hard to do, because every time you describe those acts you relive the memories over and over again. You have to revisit those dark memories you have spent years learning how to suppress, all in the hope that someone will believe you and fight for you.
Many victims may ask why I would want to put myself through that. It is a question I have often asked myself. What have I personally got out of telling my story? For years I took the road of silence thinking that was the easier road to take. Silence, secrecy and shame are the child’s worst enemies and the paedophile’s best friends.
So I tied my secret up in a box and left it on a shelf thinking that I was dealing with it. But all it did was create destructive behaviours that impacted on my life for years. Years spent trying to create the perfect world all so I could feel safe. But I wasn’t safe, I was just avoiding.
Finally, after suffering years of trauma and an eating disorder, I decided to untie my box and let my secret out. It was not easy to do. And it certainly has been filled with disappointments, frustrations and anger, and the shedding of many tears.
I have realised however that the road filled with road blocks, potholes and rough edges is the one that has allowed me to recover. As the years have passed I have realised that finding my voice and telling my story is much more powerful than suffering all of those years in silence. And when you make your voice a part of your healing process, it is the moment you cease being a victim and you became a survivor.
And as a survivor I plan to continue to use my voice for all of those who are yet to find theirs. When they finally do, hopefully the path will be less rocky, because every victim who uses their voice makes the journey a little bit easier for the next.
The report released recently by the Royal Commission gives us our first glimmer of hope in more than a decade that allows us to press the DPP to restate the charges against Volkers.
Some may say it’s just another report, words on a paper but to me those words remind me of how strong we have become. How powerful our voices can be when we come together and tell our story.
So now it is up to the DPP to do their job and use their voice to make sure perpetrators are brought to justice.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has released a report about how the Queensland Academy of Sport, Swimming Australia and the Director of Public Prosecutions in Queensland and New South Wales dealt with the allegations against Scott Volkers. The Commission found that there were “inadequacies” in the way that these bodies dealt with the allegations. It is the hope of Ms Gilbert and other alleged victims of Mr Volkers that the DPP will reinstate the charges, so the charges can be explored fully by a court.
Julie Gilbert_ Why I had to speak out about Scott Volkers
Associated Press, Lawsuits: Portland, Maine, Diocese Hid Sex Abuse by Priest, ABC News
/in Maine /by SOL ReformSix men have sued the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, claiming church leaders concealed allegations that a priest sexually abused children for decades.
The suits, filed in November by men from Maine, New Hampshire and New York, were made public this week and accuse the diocese of covering up abuse by the Rev. James Vallely. The men say Vallely sexually abused them from 1958 to 1977 when they were ages 8 to 15.
Their lawyer, Mitchell Garabedian, said Tuesday that the suits claim the church “fraudulently concealed” Vallely’s abuse. Vallely died in 1997 in Florida.
The concealment claim opens the way to sue even though the statute of limitations for sexual abuse has expired. Garabedian said former Bishop Daniel Feeney, who led the diocese from 1955 until his death in 1969, knew Vallely abused minors but did nothing, allowing him to continue to abuse children.
The evidence that Feeney was aware of the abuse came from a letter revealed recently as part of a separate lawsuit that indicated the diocese knew about Vallely’s abuse in 1956, Garabedian said. The diocese had previously said it knew of credible allegations against Vallely going back only to 1977. Written in July 2005, the letter from one priest to another in the diocese says Feeney transferred Vallely to a different parish in 1956, shortly after learning of the sexual abuse allegations.
“I have no evidence indicating that Bishop Feeney warned the public to protect their children against Father Vallely,” said Garabedian, who brought the lawsuit against the Rev. John Geoghan that sparked the church abuse scandal in Boston more than a decade ago. “Father Vallelly was shuttled from parish to parish to parish, as were so many other abusers.”
Diocesan spokesman David Guthro said the diocese couldn’t comment on a pending lawsuit. The diocese’s lawyer, Gerald Petruccelli, said he got the complaints Tuesday morning and couldn’t immediately comment on the claims.
The suit is seeking unspecified monetary damages.
“What my clients are seeking is validation and a monetary award will be validation,” Garabedian said. “They want to regain self-esteem and self-respect.”
Full article: http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/lawsuits-portland-maine-diocese-hid-sex-abuse-priest-36102552
Richard Lardner, Eileen Sullivan and Meghan Hoyer, Associated Press, Pentagon: Hundreds of military kids sexually abused, First Coast News
/in Uncategorized /by SOL ReformThe children of service members are victims in hundreds of incidents of sexual abuse each year, according to data the Defense Department provided exclusively to the Associated Press.
The abuse of military dependents is committed most often by male enlisted troops, the data show, followed by family members.
The figures offer greater insight into the sexual abuse of children committed by service members, a problem of uncertain scale due to a lack of transparency into the military’s legal proceedings. With more than 1 million military dependents, the number of cases appears statistically small. But for a profession that prides itself on honor and discipline, any episodes of abuse cast a pall.
Those numbers fall well-short of a full picture.
Ages of the offenders and victims, locations of the incidents and the branch of service that received the report of sexual abuse were omitted. The Defense Department said in a statement that “information that could unintentionally uniquely identify victims was withheld from release to eliminate possible ‘re-victimization’ of the innocent.”
It’s also unclear how many of the incidents resulted in legal action. The cases represent substantiated occurrences of child sexual abuse reported to the Defense Department’s Family Advocacy Program, which does not track judicial proceedings, the department said.
An AP investigation published in November found more inmates are in military prisons for child sex crimes than for any other offense. But the military’s opaque justice system keeps the public from knowing the full extent of their crimes or how much time they spend behind bars.
Responding to AP’s findings, three Democratic senators have urged Defense Secretary Ash Carter to lift what they called the military justice system’s “cloak of secrecy” and make records from sex crimes trials readily accessible.
The senators also raised another concern. Cases involving children are not included in the Defense Department’s annual report to Congress on sexual assaults, which focuses primarily on adult-on-adult incidents, they said. The senators — Barbara Boxer of California, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii — told Carter in a Dec. 8 letter they are concerned the department may be underestimating how many sexual assaults are occurring in the military.
There were at least 1,584 substantiated cases of military dependents being sexually abused between fiscal years 2010 and 2014, according to the data. Enlisted service members sexually abused children in 840 cases. Family members of the victims accounted for the second largest category with 332 cases.
Most of the enlisted offenders were males whose ranks ranged between E-4 and E-6. In the Marine Corps and Army, for example, those troops are corporals, sergeants and staff sergeants. Officers were involved in 49 of the cases. The victims were overwhelmingly female.
Kathy Robertson, manager of the Family Advocacy Program, said in an emailed response to questions that the incident rates reflect the U.S. military’s demographics. Most of the cases involve the E-4 and E-6 ranks because they are the largest number of active-duty personnel and the largest number of parents in themilitary, she said.
Duplications in the data indicate as many as 160 additional cases of sexual abuse could have occurred during the 2010 to 2014 period, involving a child who was victimized multiple times or a repeat abuser. The figures also account only for cases involving military dependents, which are the only child victims the department tracks.
Pentagon_ Hundreds of military kids sexually abused
Tazeen Ahmad, Guest post: “We must have the courage to face child sexual abuse”, Mumsnet
/in Uncategorized /by SOL ReformGuest post: “We must have the courage to face child sexual abuse”
“The latest report from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner is heartbreaking – but it must also be our wake-up call, says broadcaster Tazeen Ahmad.
The number one question I’ve been asked since my BBC2 investigation ‘The Truth about Child Sex Abuse’ aired is this: “How do I talk to my kids about something this dreadful?”
Over the past several months I’ve been working with the BBC to investigate child sex abuse in the UK, using the findings from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner’s latest report. I’ve been reporting on this crime for over five years, but even so, I was shocked by the scale of it. According to the OCC, between 2012 and 2014:
• 425,000 children (equivalent to one in every UK classroom) were sexually abused
• there were fewer than 6,500 convictions
• of those who were abused, only one in eight reported it
• in three out of four cases, no criminal charges were brought
• two-thirds of victims were abused by someone in their family, or someone they knew through their family
The statistics tell a clear story, but it’s not one we want to hear. The greatest risk to our children isn’t stranger danger. Nor is it gang grooming or high-profile abusers. The biggest risk lies closer to home. We thought that if we kept our kids off the streets and told them not to talk to strangers, we could keep them safe. But how do we protect them from the unknown enemy within, people they may like and trust: neighbours, family friends, the nanny, babysitter or au pair? Or even people we love or trust: their uncle, stepdad, grandfather? Their father?
MOSAC, a remarkable charity that has worked for over 21 years with the parents and carers of sexually abused children, has long known where these crimes take place and by whom they’re committed. They say it generally happens in or around the family environment, carried out by someone the child knows. Our own investigations bore this out: we spoke to several young people who’d been abused by a close family member: fathers, stepfathers, family friends; even, in one instance, a mother.
Educating children offers one answer, but it’s only half the battle. It’s grossly irresponsible to place the burden on a traumatised and terrified child to report abuse.
If anything good came out of the vile crimes of Jimmy Savile et al, and the child sexual exploitation stories that I’ve often reported myself, it’s that tough, unpalatable discussions are now taking place in the public domain. The next step is to find a way to share that discussion, difficult as it is, with our children. The NSPCC’s Underwear Rule Campaign offers brilliant tips on teaching children about their privacy and explaining abuse. This discussion needs to extend into schools across the country too.
During an interview to publicise the film, I was asked: “Why don’t children report this crime?” The truth is that a child who is scared and has been intensively groomed will be confused, traumatised and unsure of where to turn. They may feel guilty, be afraid their family will split up as a result of their speaking out, or be trying to protect themselves or their non-abusing loved ones. They may have been manipulated into distrusting everyone, or not have found an opportunity to tell. Children also often don’t know what’s permissible and what isn’t, in the way that adults do. The reasons are complex and countless. Abusers know all of this, and they exploit it.
So educating children offers one answer, but it’s only half the battle. It’s grossly irresponsible to place the burden on a traumatised and terrified child to report abuse. After all, a baby or very young child cannot carry this responsibility. We need to look at what more we adults can do to identify, investigate and prosecute this crime. One thing’s clear: our disclosure-based legal system isn’t working. “We have to change the system, we have to change our approach,” said Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner. How a child takes on their adult abuser legally is a pressing matter for our criminal justice system to address.
One sign of hope comes from the internet, which while arguably part of the problem, also offers a solution. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) told me that child sex abuse images shared on the internet provide vital clues; last year it helped them locate and save a hundred children from further abuse. Those images can also provide much-needed corroboration when someone is arrested on child abuse charges. If police seize technological devices – phones, cameras, laptops – when they make an arrest, it could provide crucial evidence to back up a child’s claim. This needs to be mandatory for police forces around the country. Our criminal justice system evidently has a lot of work to do.
For the rest of us, the first step is to educate ourselves and our children. We also need to look out for signs and symptoms of abuse, because children often don’t use words. Extreme bedwetting, withdrawal, inexplicable anger, self-harm and behavioural changes are just some of the indicators – though these can, of course, be the symptoms of development stages or other anxieties. One key piece of advice: listen to your gut.
The figures, heartbreaking and horrific, are a wake-up call; we are letting our children down. We can take steps to identify and protect against these terrible crimes, but first we need the courage to face them.
Full article: http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/guest_posts/a2520658-Guest-post-We-must-have-the-courage-to-face-child-sexual-abuse
A voice for Gafni’s victims, from one who was there, The Times of Israel
/in Uncategorized /by SOL ReformThere are scores of us. Most of us silent. Most of us not wanting our names uttered aloud, thrown around like dice or like darts. Not wanting to reawaken this sleeping giant of a trauma. We have moved on, after all. And what good would it do anyway?
But what if it could? Do good, that is.
Protect some girl.
Protect some woman. Some student. Some unsuspecting soul.
What if writing my story of abuse could save someone else from having to write theirs?
Tonight is New Years Eve, the night we got married nearly two decades ago.
Sharing this chronicle is my anti-anniversary present – to myself. To use, hopefully for the good, something that was so bad.
I share it with a prayer for all the other victims. The silent ones, the screaming ones.
Praying for my abusive ex
May 1996: (Age 21) Please God, there is this man, a Rabbi, no less. He is quite simply the most dynamic drop-dead kosher sexy rock-star Rabbi I have ever met. He just quoted Nietzsche, Jerry Garcia and Rebbe Nachman in one class. AND he’s single. Okay, he’s been married….Twice. With 3 kids. And he’s 15 years older than me…But….he’s perfect. He’s brilliant. And I like him. I mean, I really like him. God, please, let him like me.
September 1998: Thank you thank you thank you God. It happened. He likes me. In fact, he loves me. He asked me to marry him! And after only 4 months of dating. He says once we’re married then finally he will be accepted in the Orthodox world again. Once we are married his enemies will stop hounding him. Once we are married I can help him become the great man he is destined to be.
December 1998: Please God give me guidance. Just heard from a concerned friend that he slept with one of his old girlfriends while I was out of town. And others have come up to me warning me about him. Saying the most awful things. The.most.awful.things. He insists they are mere spiteful rumors. He’s done teshuva. For me. I can help him be a better man. Please God give me guidance. The wedding is in 3 weeks…
July 1999: Please God give me strength. I am working so hard, but I need to work harder. My holy husband and I are sculpting this glorious vision — of Jewish Renaissance, of reconnecting people to Israel, to their souls. I am swamped with research, book-writing, hosting, cooking, cleaning, flyers, gigs. Giving everything I’ve got to move this mission forward. He says I have a rosh-katan — a small head. I need to see the big picture and work harder. Help me to help him…
June 2001: Dear God, life is thrilling. He has a television show. His book is a best seller. I poured my soul into writing it with him and look what an impact it has had. But the more things grow, the more the work grows. The more his temper grows. He berates me daily. Whenever I neglect to tell people about his accomplishments he accuses me of being unsupportive & selfish. I forget an email and he explodes into a rage. Yelling relentlessly, shoving things. He pulled out a chair from under me. He rants until I crawl up into a small ball on the bed and weep. Please God help me learn how to handle his rages. Help me to be a better wife. Please…
January 2002: Dear God, I’m confused. He has this “teaching partner”. He spends all of his time with her. I don’t like the energy between them. I have pleaded with him to stop working with her. He refuses. Claims I am being jealous, needy. I asked if they are having an affair. He went off into a loud round of denial. Says I am insecure, delusional. Please God, help me stop being so jealous, so sad, so needy.
Oxford, May 2003: Please God, help me. I am sick….often. I am having these migraine headaches. My skull is exploding. I can’t breathe. My chest is sealed shut. I am a shell. When I go outside people come up to me rambling about how my husband is sleeping with this woman who comes to his classes. He promises me it’s all lies. All I know is that I am hurting God. Physically, emotionally, mentally. I am not well. Please God let these headaches end.
March 2004: Please God, give me guidance. He admitted to the Oxford affair. Finally. Promises me it was just this one, it will never happen again. Promises me it will be different now. We have Bayit Chadash – this beautiful spiritual center by the ocean. We have built this precious community of students. I have invested all of myself into nurturing this mission. It would all fall to pieces if I left. Please God give me clarity.
October 2004: Please God, just keep him away from me. I made the cut. Left Israel. Left the Center. Left him. Got a quiet get of divorce. He’s begging me to keep it a secret. There’s another damning article coming out against him. He insists that if I share that we are divorced, then all that we worked so hard to build will be destroyed. Fine, this one last thing. Just please let him stop barraging me with those long pleading emails. Keep him away from me.
October 2005: Please God, keep this going. This feels good, this being on my own. I am loving California. It’s like a therapeutic post-divorce Xanadu. I am breathing again. I am me. My eyes have been opened to the madness of these past seven years. I am no longer keeping his secrets. No longer doubting my own senses. I see my own wounds, my shadow, my poor choices. Dear God, at least let me help other women lest they end up like I did.
May 2006: Thank you God, the truth is finally out. And big. A group of women from Bayit Chadash finally got together. They have gone to the police. Finally speaking out loud and clear about how this charlatan is a predator. A manipulator. A sociopath. A danger. Finally I am getting confirmation of the many, unbelievably many affairs he had while married to me. From the “teaching partner” to the millionaire funder to this student and that student and another. He has fled the country…ousted from the Jewish world. Finally and entirely. Thank you God, he won’t be able to hurt any more women. Never again.
Jan. 2007: Please God help me to prioritize the right things in a partner this time. I don’t want an external “success story” that dissolves into dismal failure. I don’t want fame. I want an honest man, with integrity, with depth. A man who can communicate, who can empathize. A man to raise children with. I think I found him. Please God help me to value the gold, not the glitter.
May 2009: Thank you God for this good man, this mensch I have married. He is grounded. He is a loving father. Our house is stable and THIS is sacred. We talk about our feelings. We work through our challenges. We learn together. We work together. He lets me be myself. I let me be myself. Please God just stop the nightmares. The ones where my ex is back in my bed. With his hands on my neck. Why does he continue to assault me in my dreams?
October 2011: Dear God, a new crop of victims have emerged…again. Same stories, new cities. Abusing power, abusing women. Now in the New Age world. God help them. Please protect those easily-beguiled souls. Like me. The ones “consensually” seduced by his badgering brilliance. Protect the ones who only want to see the light, who deny the darkness until they are its easiest prey. Help them do their due diligence. Let their leaders see through the “brilliance” to the rot beneath.
Dec 25, 2015: Dear God, I have just read this New York Time article. About him and his latest lunge to power. The sick tale retold, again, decades later. How can it be that there is zero condemnation in this spineless article? Just quotes of excuse from high-power supporters. Just the last word given to the abuser. Just another free pass to the genius caught with his pants down. I am furious for the bruised dozens of victims. Furious for my nightmares that still won’t end. Please God protect us from the smiling sociopaths whose hands drip with candy.
Dec 31, 2015: Age 41 – Please God, help MG undo himself. Let his inner demon loosen his grip. Let it end already. For the sake of his victims, past and future, for the sake of his own broken inner-innocence.
For the sake of that sprite of a child I saw glimpses of way back when, in old family photos. The one with a broken home. The one who inherited the Holocaust in his bones. Before all the mania, the masochism, before the sex addiction set in. Please God help that shivering boy escape all this.
And help the rest of us – his victims, his critics, and even his hoodwinked supporters. We have all failed. We failed by praising his genius while ignoring his demons. We failed by giving him free passes instead of limited access. We were blinded by the lime-lit glitz of his wit, his intelligence. We failed by upholding societal standards of “success” that are simply cancerous. We failed by honoring the powerful while silencing the victims.
It is exactly twenty years since I uttered my first prayer for this man. We were married on New Year’s Eve, the very day I share this.
May the circle be full and finished now.
Putting this two-decade chronicle into print is a risk for me.
Everyone who cares about me is begging me to just “Keep quiet”.
And yet I can’t. So, in honor of them, I leave out my name.
But in honor of the victims I share my story.
Yes, there is a risk to writing this “aloud.” But there is also a risk to staying silent, staying safe. Twenty years and untold numbers of victims later, I have learned that staying safe can also be risky business.
One last prayer
So this final prayer, I type aloud. And may it be all the better heard, heeded and answered because it has been shared:
Dear God, may this man’s access end. May his abuses be made impossible because of the diligent campaigns of protest being launched right now. May the lessons be learned. May the victims know healing. May the nightmares end.
Full article: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/from-one-gafni-victim/