have you been sexually assaulted?

i'm a male and i haven't been

How would you define sexual assault? When school kids play nut-grub does that count as sexual assault?

How would you define suggest banned?

I don't understand how I have offended you, Hardman Hoos (also known as the Steendriver). I was actually posing a serious question up there, without any intention of causing outrage or amusement or whatever.

yeah Hoos I don't think this is a disrespectful or out-of-line question at all and there's no reason it oughtn't lead to healthy useful discussion.

what in christ's name is nut grub?

grab

Fair enough I rescind my suggest ban.

i am a nut who has been grabbed

grubbed

http://www.ca.uky.edu/entomology/entfacts/images/nutweevl.jpg

Gross.

In all seriousness, I think you'll find the number surprisingly high.

In answer to the question - yes, I have.

i haven't, but the amount of people i know who have is considerable

Almost every one of the women I'm at all close to (or have dated seriously) has, outside my family. It's remarkably more prevalent than we act like it is.

Yes, exactly.

How would you define sexual assault? When school kids play nut-grub does that count as sexual assault?

uh i really don't want to impose definitions.

where did you go to school?

my friend was, and it was hard to hear about it.

deeznut-grub

I have a lot to say about this question but it seems to me that it's been years since you could have a productive discussion about a sensitive topic like this one on ilx, which I say without rancor by the way, just as how things seem to me. I survived physical abuse, not sexual abuse, but went on to work as a nurse & counselor for years. so many young people who start life hobbled because of sexual abuse, who'll spend much of their lives coming to terms with how hard it makes just getting by for them. so many friends in high school who had their sexuality fucked up for them. the more you learn about the cyclical nature of abuse, the harder it is to imagine a world in which the problem's even slightly smaller than it is at present.

ugly thing.

especially disturbing within the family, it seems to me. i'm sorry to hear that John. did you find that working as a nurse and counselor was really beneficial?

well, it was weird, because if you meet somebody whose story sounds like yours, in a counseling environment it sorta makes being effective less easy. long complicated theory-intensive explanations of that. at the same time, as an advocate for the right of the victim, I have to say I was really good - I identify with victims of abuse, strongly, so I'm able in a hospital/halfway-house environment to say "we're not implementing policies that make our [the providers'] lives easier unless they're actually good for the people who have to live here." I assume my own experiences helped me to play that role. but abuse is such a lonely thing - survivors relate to each other, but at the same time, the experiences tend to alert their victims/participants to just how unique each person's individual hell really is. abuse teaches a person things that are very hard to live with about the nature of things.

yes, i think i understand. it's sad to have to grow up so fast.

I survived physical abuse, not sexual abuse

yeah, me too. gave me a lifelong hatred of people who hurt kids.

the more you learn about the cyclical nature of abuse, the harder it is to imagine a world in which the problem's even slightly smaller than it is at present.

what gives me hope is the topic gets addressed more openly nowadays. imagine the latitude abusers had in earlier generations when women were legally chattel, children were seen and not heard, talking of sex was verboten, and abuse hotlines didn't exist.

yeah, me too. gave me a lifelong hatred of people who hurt kids.

yeah but...when I think about my stepfather, half the time I'm thinking about what made him who he was. how he was only playing out his own helplessness, his own victimization. it's easy to say "that's no excuse," but it's worse than an excuse: it's an explanation. the abuser encodes himself in his victim as surely as a parent encodes DNA in a child. not all survivors go on to abuse, but in how many ways do we see our identity as victims playing itself out in our lives? forever, forever.

I am probably the wrong guy to talk to about this because shit gets very dark when I think about it too much.

abuse teaches a person things that are very hard to live with about the nature of things.

Thanks for this line anyway. It made things a little bit dark here, but it helped me with some thinking.

my grandfather abused my father who in turn abused me but I've never so much as tapped my kids, so I like to think the cycle can get broken. if I choose to wander around all day feeling like a victim, that's my own internal problem. if I'm not abusing somebody else it's a net win generationally speaking.

and I don't dwell on this shit anymore - at some point you have to stop letting the assholes continue to ruin yr life. I didn't talk to my dad for 7 years, but we've gotten to the point now where we are friendly again. he gets to see his grandchildren, but I would never ever leave them alone with him.

Thanks for this line anyway. It made things a little bit dark here, but it helped me with some thinking.

no problem but hey yo I gotta insert a little caveat here: when I talk about this shit I get pretty fucking dour. I have a more or less infinite capacity for harboring dark thoughts, I feel like in the end they help me out. but I feel bad if stuff I say makes other ppl go OH FUCK IT'S WORSE THAN I THOUGHT. so, y'know, put me on ignore if my thoughts about this stuff are difficult.

the cycle can be broken, btw, in fact it can be a thing of incredible beauty if you are the person to restore/bring sanity & love to yr family. as for me I know if I had children I would take great care of them but sometimes I feel I am too damaged to be of value to anybody, which I know is some melodramatic emo bs but anybody who comes to a thread about abuse has to know that's gonna come w/the territory I figure.

haha I actually wrote "j0hn don't go all emo on us" before but decided that was kinda rude + erased it

yeah i mean, my mom never abused me physically, really. i mean she like spanked me once. but she passed other things on, that i'd be so scared to give to my kids.

Yeah that's what I'm talking about! It's like, sometimes I think parenthood is all about preserving the DNA of damage/abuse/ill health & any ideas that it can even ever be about anything else are self-justifying bullshit

which always cues the parents to go "fuck no, I'm not doing any of that" but as cabaret voltaire said there's a thousand ways

i always worry that looking into my kid's face will zap the crazy into them. doesn't that sound silly?

also, this is TMI -- emo bs stuff is allowed :)

if you want to go biological, think about evolution - breeding weeds out undesirable traits rather than reinforcing them

my wife and I are no great cracker jack prizes but people can offset each other's weaknesses instead of making them worse and hopefully produce improved versions of themselves

at least that's what the self-delusion is telling me

surmounter, if you look into yr kid's face like this it will zap the crazy into them

http://www.omfgod.com/wp-content/gallery/pictures/crazy_look.jpg

o-O

EWWW

i think you have a point about the biology stuff.

my boyfriend is more sane than i -- he says if we ever work with a surrogate mom, he will donate the DNA...

sometimes I think parenthood is all about preserving the DNA of damage/abuse/ill health & any ideas that it can even ever be about anything else are self-justifying bullshit

what does this even mean?

is a parent spanking their kid assault?

what does this even mean?

this:

man hands on misery to man.
it deepens, like a coastal shelf.
get out as early as you can,
and don't have any kids yourself.

thats kind of ridiculous

is that an extract from "this be the verse"

yes

like you didn't know that lj c'mon it's a 12-line poem

thats kind of ridiculous

but I don't think it is, in seriousness - I think if you come from a damaged family, the likelihood that you're going to pass the damage on is very, very high, and that "I know I'm fucked up, but I won't make my kid fucked up" is really any kind of sane justification.

What gets passed on is more random than that, though, except maybe in extreme cases. Which is to say every parent hands on some bad, some good, and the adults you raise aren't just the product of your own genes or failures.

I kinda thought of that poem as soon as I saw your original post which sunny took issue with...didn't need asking tbh

I think Noodle's pretty OTM there

well, firstly, what happens to you isn't in your DNA because that's scientifically impossible. what isn't DNA that you pass on is your choice. some people need to be stronger than others, sure, but to act like it is your fate to treat your own kids the same way sounds like a really bad excuse.

idk i think john's right in a sense, but it can diminish over generations as long as people don't give up. my mom was sexually abused and tho she didn't do the same to me she was a crazy controlling self-centered emotional wreck for a lot of years. even though i sort of hate her for it i respect her a lot for what she had to go through and admire how she ended up objectively a much better person than her parents. because of that, i'm fragile and moody but a lot more sane than she was.

But people inevitably pass on things that are more than or different to what they intend. It's not an excuse to accept that that's true.

My parents were in no way abusive, but still when l sometimes catch myself parenting like my Dad I do a little in-shudder and change whatever I'm doing 180 degrees quick sharp.

Which means my kids tend to end up with feckless and lacksadaisical instead of uptight and guilt-wracked, lol.

yes noodle is otm. more specifically i think that victims of sexual abuse might not abuse their own kids but they could def. be emotionally unavailable or damaged in other ways which of course affects their kids.

But people inevitably pass on things that are more than or different to what they intend. It's not an excuse to accept that that's true.

OTM. It's not any kind of excuse. It is however a good reason to think very, very hard about whether you're going to have kids - "I'm aware that I was abused" isn't even the beginning of the work one ought to do.

what isn't DNA that you pass on is your choice

it's a lot more complicated than this. I think you're looking at what I'm saying the wrong way. I'm not "excusing" anybody's abusive behavior. I am a survivor of abuse. I'm saying that the dynamic is stronger than "I'm a strong person, I survived abuse, so I'll be fine." Not every abuser - in fact, almost no abuser - wakes up one morning and says "hey, I think I want to ruin all these people in my family." Most of them are filled with self-hatred their whole lives over who they are, who their experiences have made them. It's extremely complicated. The language of "they need to rise above it" or "they're monsters" is unhelpful in the extreme; it reduces an incredibly harmful & complex process to Dr. Phil stuff.

Agreed that your own experience of family and/or abuse ought to be cause to think very hard about whether you're going to have kids. But really, wanting to have kids ought to be cause to think very hard about having kids. We all tend to have really poor track records on thinking that thru, or maybe optimism and desire tend to win out with most people most of the time?

I mean, in another poem Larkin nailed the urge to have kids as a kind of vanity and it is but that's not all it is.

Not all for sure! But some!

(I should say: I got issues in this thing. I've been getting told for many, many years what a good parent I'd make, and it's always a nice thing to hear, but anybody who thinks they can just wave farewell to unhealthy family dynamics with which they grew up is fooling themselves, and I wonder whether the sane response isn't to just end the chain once and for all. I don't know for sure; I have the same desire to share the good things about me with a daughter or son that any married person in a happy marriage has, I'd guess. But I also, from my experience, know something about people & their best intentions.)

I was sexually abused by two different people over the course of several years before I turned 10. The first abuser also did some strange non-sexual things to me that qualify as physical abuse. When I turned 16 I realized that I was the same age as my first abuser. I worked as a camp counselor at the time and stopped coming in to work because I was petrified that I was going to do something terrible--not that I ever ever had any desire to, mind you. It was just a paralyzing fear that it was somehow encoded in me.

That turned out not to be the case. With a lot of therapy I've gotten past it. I can count on one hand the number of friends that know, and now for some reason I'm talking about it on the internet.

I'm gonna go back to blogging about Return to Forever now.

<3 ((Hoos))

In the interest of full disclosure etc. the assault I was talking about occurred in college and was acquaintance rape. It totally fucked up my sexuality for a long time but I'd like to think I've dealt with it enough so that I'm ok now. Anyway . . .

Hoos I am so fond of what I know of you here, you are such a positive person on here, always with the love & good vibes. Give yourself some serious props for making yourself into who you are from the hand you got dealt. You are a real inspiration to me.

i'm trying remind myself here that you cant possibly be saying that everyone who has dealt with sexual/physical/emotional abuse is insane for having children and thinking they wont do the same to them but that's pretty much how you're coming across. thinking you can get past it/learn to deal with it and treat your children with respect and decency might be some 'dr phil shit' because obviously not everyone can but saying that everyone who has had something horrible happened to them at the hands of someone else will ruin their children is pretty defeatist, naive and really, incredibly insulting.

Sorry for answering the original question when the thread has become about child abuse now, but I *really* don't want to get into that on nu-ILX.

I've already written too much already on ILX about being the survivor of sexual assault.

I like to think that I've taken something out of the experiences - that it really did kind of install a sense of fearlessness in me - like, I've already *survived* the worst thing that could possibly happen to a person, so why should I worry about anything else?

But it does change you, and it does affect you. And it makes me really angry when losers on ILX like to post pictures of crazy cat ladies after things that I say... because it's like... "How do you think I *got* so bitter?" You haven't live my life, you have no right to judge my reactions to experiences I've gone through.

Sorry it didn't turn me into a saint or anything.

Thank you guys.

It's times like these when I realize my joke username is inappropriate so I go to change it and I realize my regular username is still BIG HOOS aka the steendriver.

xxp

sorry sunny, <3 u, but i don't think john is saying that at all, i gotta speak up for him because the 2nd quote is basically how i feel about having kids:

not all survivors go on to abuse

the cycle can be broken, btw, in fact it can be a thing of incredible beauty if you are the person to restore/bring sanity & love to yr family. as for me I know if I had children I would take great care of them but sometimes I feel I am too damaged to be of value to anybody, which I know is some melodramatic emo bs but anybody who comes to a thread about abuse has to know that's gonna come w/the territory I figure.

It is however a good reason to think very, very hard about whether you're going to have kids - "I'm aware that I was abused" isn't even the beginning of the work one ought to do.

i didn't even see that! i said i was trying to remind myself because i knew he couldn't be saying that abuse = don't have children. apologies JD. i still hate that people feel like abuse is hard coded into them. i feel like its something tv quacks have told us for years and now we all believe it. i'm not saying that patterns don't exist but telling people they cant change things because they are a victim and therefore fated to victimize just makes me so mad. for my own personal experience i grew up with very very angry alcoholics so when people say this stuff is sure to be repeated with my own children i tend to get a little put out!

'sall love sunny it's a really thorny subject!

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Jesus Christ.

So, about a quarter.

A quarter is what the usual statistics say, right? 1 in 4?

Nearly 2/3 of the women on this forum. That makes me feel kind of sick inside.

Though that might be skewed by the very unequal gender distribution on this forum. Which makes me unhappy in a different sort of way.

I didn't vote, but when I was in middle school, a stronger kid tackled me to the ground and forcibly dry-humped me for several minutes. I know that that's really only the tip of the iceberg for some people, but I was terrified at the time. It just recently occured to me that he was probably going through much worse shit at home or at church.

It seems like almost every woman I meet was physically or sexually abused as a kid. I'd like to buy those women guns.