21.0 Fathers
shame the day he died,
because I was glad.
14 of the participants speak of
their fathers in relation to shame. Fathers are spoken of 79 times in the
interviews (appendix 4) and seem to be discussed in relation to the abuse fathers
have committed. Both children (124 times) and mothers (123 times) are spoken of
by all participants and clearly more often than fathers. In my opinion, this
seems to suggest that after being sexually abused by ones father, having the
possible consequence of emotional bonds being broken, and the development of
distrust instead of trust, the abusive father might not be a significant other
as before the abuse. Children and mothers might be more significant others than
fathers. This might also have to do with traditional gender relationships
within families in western society, that children have a closer emotional
relationship to mothers than to fathers. Finding the motives which seem to
cause these differences will demand further investigation.
One should perhaps suppose that
victims hate their fathers after the abuse or at least feel indifferent to
them, but such emotions are not confirmed in this study. On the contrary, only
seven participants speak of hate and mention it only 12 times, and just two
speak of indifference and these mention it only four times. When participants
speak of hate, it is usually as self-hate and not hate towards others. This
seems also to confirm my assumption that fathers are discharged as a
significant other and made insignificant as a personal relationship. This might
also be why some participants say they are themselves responsible for the
abuse, and not their abusers. I will now explore closer the relationship
between shame and fathers as it is told by the participants in this study.
First of all I feel it necessary
with a notice of warning in regards to some of the stories to come which to a
certain degree go into detailed description of experienced sexual abuse. These
narratives are in my opinion not only painful re-constructions of sexual abuse,
but also stories that show how difficult it can be to speak of shame.
Linda was abused by her father from
the age of five. She has no memory of her childhood before this. Her father
gagged her, threatened her and raped her. Before she was raped the first time
she says she was Daddy’s little girl and that he was gentle with her. He
continued to abuse her sexually until she was a teenager, and he died. Her
brother was also involved and sexually abused her throughout her childhood and
youth. Linda says that from the time she was nine her father used her to win
money in poker games with his friends. She had to sit on the laps of the men
who were playing cards and had to let them paw her. The one who won the poker
game gave the winnings to Linda’s father to pay for being allowed to abuse her
sexually after the game. Linda does not mention shame here, but her various
body gestures suggest that some level of shame is present when she
re-constructs the story of the sexual abuse she suffered as a child; she
scratches herself often, looks away, stops talking often, bites her lips, and
closes her eyes. Linda’s body gestures seem to include several of non-verbal
markers, suggesting that it has been difficult and perhaps shameful for her to
speak about the part of her life story (appendix 20).
Linda_1: I
left my body ((scratches her elbow)),
in the beginning (.) umm, I was maybe
five or six ((drinks water)) then
(.) maybe it was one of the first times
when it wasn’t (.) I got a lot of attention
and they were all so positive towards me. I felt that I was Daddy’s little
girl. He was very gentle with me and everything. It wasn’t so bad then, but it
became more violent in a way. When he raped me the first time ((scratches
her head and looks away)), it was
terrible (.) and I was abused in many
different ways. One thing was the rape; another thing was that he tied a scarf
around my neck and mouth so I couldn’t yell. It becomes (.) you become paralyzed in a way
((scratches her elbow)) when things
happen. I was desperate afterwards because I was afraid that mom would realize
what had happened and notice all the blood in the bed. So I removed the bed
sheet ((scratches herself vigorously on her elbow)) and hid it by burying it behind the cemetery and ((breaths out
deeply)) umm (.)…We sometimes visited a friend of my father after work and umm (.) they drank and played cards and that’s
where it happened ((scratches herself intensely on her elbow and bites her
lip))…It started with me sitting on a
table, or I had been with them many times before, and I was with them looking
for empty bottles and, and got some sweets from them. But umm in any case, my father
got the money that was in the pot. I don’t know if he did it for money, but
that was the start. The one who won in the end got to go to bed with me and my
father got the money that was in the pot…The poker player, the one who won the
money exchanged the money for me ((bites herself on the lip and closes her
eyes))…Umm so I think my father did it
for money ((scratches her elbow))…They
all liked it. For every round in cards, I sat on the laps of the men and they
sat and fingered with me and I was sent round the table…I felt how they reacted
to me; I sat on their laps and felt them on my behind. I was nine, ten, no I
was nine years old when this started…He threatened me and said I’d be sent to
an orphanage if I ever said anything.
Linda says that she felt a close
relationship to her father as a child, even when the sexual abuse had began.
She describes her father as gentle during the abuse in the beginning. She even
felt the recognition of being “daddy’s little girl”. But even if the abuse was
what she calls gentle, she says she experienced leaving her body. A definite
change happened when the abuse became more violent and she experienced being
raped by her father, and she became frightened of the thought that her mother
should discover the abuse. She tries to hide all evidence of what had happened,
suggesting here in my opinion the feeling of shame. She also emphasises the
effect of being threatened; of being gagged with the possible difficulty of
breathing this implies; not being able to scream when she most likely felt the
physical pain involved when a six year old has sexual intercourse with an adult
man. The abuse did not stop, and it is possible to imagine that she felt an
extreme amount of insecurity of not knowing when she would experience being
raped again. The abuse continued throughout her childhood and evolved to also
include her father’s friends and her brother.
One question I have struggled with
from Linda’s story is if it is possible for Linda’s father, his friends, and
her brother, not to feel any shame or guilt after abusing her? It seems
difficult to understand how a child can be abused like this for years, without
perpetrators showing any signs of shame. Proeve and Howells (2002) argue that
there are actually a number of sex offenders who do not experience shame or
guilt. They may have no particularly negative feelings about themselves or their
actions. However, the many child sex offenders who describe that they feel bad
are more likely to experience shame rather than guilt. They argue that child
sex offenders are most likely to be characterized by shame and that it is to be
expected that breaking the strong social prohibition against sexual contact
with children would predispose offenders to experience shame. Committing sexual
offences against children and being discovered would be expected to increase
external shame more than internal shame, especially if offenders are strongly
attuned to the reactions of others.
Linda says that she felt that she
was Daddy’s little girl before she was raped by him the first time. Receiving
recognition from significant others is an important factor in Cooley’s
Looking-Glass self when he argues that we use the reactions of others to visualize ourselves, and
use their evaluation to establish some kind of self-feeling, such as pride or
shame/mortification
(Cooley 1902/2006: 184). Linda says that she has met others who have given
their bodies away just for the sake of recognition.
Linda_1: A
lot of them give away their bodies because that’s the only form of recognition
they’ve ever received from their father for example, and they’re used to umm ((Scratches
her side)) giving away their bodies because
they know that’s what boys want. It gives them recognition.
This seems to signify in my opinion
that recognition is an important factor in the development of identities.
Recognition is so important that some are willing to give away their bodies in
order to receive it. Ellen says that she did everything she could at home in order
to get recognition. When something went wrong at home, she took responsibility
and the blame. Even her father’s drinking problem was her responsibility when
she was eight years old.
Ellen: And I did everything, everything to
get recognition. I did a lot at home; I helped Mom with the washing, made
dinner, and cleaned the house before Dad came home from work. My dad was an
alcoholic and things like that. And at the same time I had to make sure that
when something was wrong, it was always my fault. I did everything to be a good
girl. And I didn’t succeed. And a little girl of six or seven shouldn’t have to
have thoughts like that. But I found never being seen or recognized very difficult.
Hello, I’m over here ((raises her hand and waves)). And that’s a feeling I still have, or can still struggle with…When I
was eight; I was given the responsibility for my father’s drinking. If you
don’t behave, if you don’t behave, an aunt of mine who had five kids of her own
told me, and then your father will keep on drinking. There was so much noise at
home, and that’s why my father drank…And so I carried this burden on my
shoulders, too, and then I had to do everything I could to get him to stop
drinking. But whatever I did, he still went on drinking.
Kaare: Was it your fault that he drank?
Ellen: No, it wasn’t. But I felt it was at that time, it’s starting to go away
now. But I’ve struggled with this until six years ago. Five maybe…I felt the
same way when my father got cancer. Why didn’t I see it?...I was told that umm
if I hadn’t been born, then Mom and Dad wouldn’t have got married, and Dad
wouldn’t have become an alcoholic ((Nods her head)).
Ellen does not seem here say
anything negative about her father or feeling shame in relation to him. Her
wish was to be conceived as a good girl and did whatever she could to be
recognized as such, but says that she didn’t manage to achieve this. Being
responsible for her fathers drinking problems is a burden she says she carried
on her shoulders, which in my opinion suggest that the burden was heavy and
kept her down and made her feel small, which can be regarded as an expression
for shame.
Ruth argues that women who have been
sexually abused by their fathers most likely do not feel shame towards their
fathers. She believes that they feel that they themselves are responsible for
participating in the abuse and that’s why they feel guilt. Shame, she says, is
reserved for their mothers.
Kaare: Are they ashamed in relation to their
fathers?
Ruth_1: ((shakes her head)) No, I think they feel something else there,
guilt and responsibility for their actions. They become a part of the action in
a way (.) and give it to themselves,
so that they have umm a role here. And therefore they don’t blame their father;
therefore they don’t feel shame only in relation to their fathers. But often
they feel shame in relation to their mothers.
Being victimized may for some be experienced
as unexplainable that the only rational reason they find for the abuse is that
they have done something wrong by being apart of the exploitation. Guilt and
responsibility are therefore often taken upon themselves instead of placing
them on the abuser. Ruth goes on to speak of speak of a woman she has met who
was made pregnant by her father two times and feels shame when she thinks of
the dates her children were supposed to be born.
Ruth_1: Umm,
there’s so much brutality. There are so many, so many cruel actions children
and young people have been subjected to. Umm I thought of this in the break
just now ((lifts her hands and covers her face)). (.) Some of them have been pregnant with their abusers. With their fathers…Yeah.
One of them was 18-19 I think. She had been pregnant two times with her father (.)…And in all this she is ashamed over the
dates umm for their birthdays, if she had given birth to the children. So last
year, she had, then she should have had one that was two or three or whatever
it was. She was ashamed that she actually thought of the dates. Her shame was
related to (.) dates, and years
(.). “You just ought to know, Ruth what (.) what I have done”, she said (.) and then she told me that she had been
pregnant with her father’s child. “What do you say to that,” she asked? A
little difficult, what do you say to that?
Some victims of sexual abuse
experience becoming pregnant with their abuser. When a girl becomes pregnant
with her father, the family taboo of incest is broken twofold. The victim Ruth
speaks of here, does not say anything negative towards her father and does not
mention any feeling of shame towards him. Shame is an emotion she experiences
in relation to children she could have given birth to. It may seem difficult
for many to grasp the many ways victimization can come into existence.
In this section, I have taken a
closer look at the relation between shame and fathers. The participants in the
interviews seldom mention shame in relation to their fathers. It seems as though
they feel guilty about participating in the abuse with their fathers, and do
not recognize feelings of shame in relation to their fathers. The shame they
feel is directed at them as victims, but this seems to be an emotion that
develops over time, as the child grows and understands that one has
participated in actions ones friends have not experienced. They start to feel
different; there must be something wrong with them since they are being abused.
They start to hate themselves, want to hide, to die, or be someone else, and
shame starts to dominate their lives. None of the information given indicates
that the fathers show any signs of guilt or shame. This does not mean that
guilt and shame are not present, they may be very much present, but simply not
acknowledged. When these emotions are not acknowledged after the abuse, it may
seem that the abusers are indifferent, and this could explain why the abuse
continues. It seems difficult to understand how the abuse could continue if the
abuser felt and acknowledged their feelings of guilt and shame.
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