I was abused by my parents. Both of them.
Those words seem so matter of fact, don’t they? To me they do. Maybe to you the are unbelievable words, they might make you feel horror, they might make you feel disgusted. They don’t make me feel anything. I asked John if he would like me to write a piece on parental abuse, and he said he would but he thought it would be very difficult for me to write, not wanting me to feel pressured into doing it or simply caring for how it would make me feel. Despite what you hear John is a good person (debatable – ed), a lot of the time I can tell, or it’s at least very easy to tell who the bad people are, when you grow up with evil it tends to leave you with an innate ability to spot evil a mile away.
My life was stolen from me by the very people who brought me into the world. Let me make it perfectly clear – abuse destroys your life. Utterly, completely, in every single conceivable way. You are left a shell – no, it’s worse than that, you are a person but you are trapped in a shell that you are terrified to come out of, because the shell is what you used to protect yourself.
How can you live with this confusion? You just do, what other choice do you have, you just get on with things. Thankfully I have been able to work on myself for the last 20 years, but that has just meant that I have moved slightly back towards normal. 20 years of toil, suffering, tears, arguments, and still I’m not fixed. I don’t think I ever will be. Like I said, abuse destroys you.
Every time I hear another story about child abuse, every report on the conviction of another abuser, I know what will happen. There will be a million words, thousands of thoughts, a lot of idiots, and endless discussion. 99% of all of that chatter would be about the abusers, or in this case, to be clear, alleged abusers. It is always the same, everything is centred around the abuser and what they have done. The victims and alleged victims are there, but they are a sideshow, a mere prologue to the main story. We are forgotten. Every. Single. Time.
It’s somewhat human nature. The very acts of abuse and the perpetrators are somehow interesting to us. Not in a perverse way (although there will be some who are getting a kick out of it), but in a strange lack of comprehension. “How can someone be so evil?”, we ask ourselves. We try to imagine what could possibly drive an abuser to do what they do. There’s a myriad of reasons, a lot of the time it’s historical abuse of the abuser, but please never consider using that in any way to feel sorry for any abuser. The single thing that I am proud of in my life, well as proud as I can ever allow myself to be, is that I have broken the cycle of abuse, and my son will not fall victim. Breaking the cycle is difficult, but let’s be perfectly clear – anyone who does not do it and abuses because they were abused does not deserve any sympathy, they still knew right from wrong, and they chose the path of wrong.
But even those who were not abused, who did not suffer as a child, who haven’t even had a difficult life, will still abuse. As I have said, there are many reasons, but the one which is somehow sidelined these days is the simple fact – some people are just evil. I’m not religious, this isn’t a religious thing. There are just some people who chose to be bad. I see today excuses being made for everyone, I see some people try to explain why someone has done such a horrid thing. Yes, it’s human nature to want answers, but the answer can be – that person is just bad. The people who are afraid to believe there are evil people in the world I can excuse, it is very scary to admit evil exists because you never know when it will visit you. But there are people who try to excuse or explain evil, those people I have the utmost contempt for, and most of the time I believe they are trying to hide something. I could be wrong of course, but as I said, I can spot evil a mile away.
Unfortunately most of the time I cannot point it out because evil is very good at hiding in plain sight. It is extremely good in making people believe it is good. How many times have you seen someone who was considered a pillar of the community end up being caught out? It’s a lot, and nowhere near all of these people have been caught.
My parents are still pillars of the community. They will never face justice for what they did to me (and others). There’s nothing I can ever do about that. I know some of you may want to scream at me to go to the authorities but it’s not that simple, it’s never that simple. There are other lives at stake. Lives which would be destroyed. It makes me angry that they will never face justice, it makes me angry that others will never know what they did, but what’s the point – I can never get back what they took from me. I can only move on with my life, being angry is just allowing them to stay in control of me.
To come forward any victim has to be unbelievably brave, and every time I hear of another victim I wish I was there to be able to listen to them, because they still have so much pain and suffering to go through. I wish I was able to help them. And maybe as a society we should stop focusing on abusers, confirmed and alleged. Because attention is sometimes what they crave. And because the victims are still suffering, and sometimes they still need attention.
There’s no punishment that will ever be sufficient to a parental child abuser. But there should be a punishment available to us victims to mete out to anyone who ever again says to us “but they’re still your parents”. They just happen to have biologically given birth to us. They are as far from parents as it can ever be.
Editor’s note: The author’s name and identity is known to me, but they have been granted anonymity in order to discuss matters of a deeply personal and upsetting nature.
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