The hidden signs of abuse – excerpt 1

How can you tell a child is being sexually abused? Child abuse takes place in secret. Are there signs? Can we, as adults, spot these children?

Here’s a quote from the beginning of my book, Confessions of a Trauma Therapist:

Looking at me during my childhood years you would have seen a spoiled rich kid always smiling and never causing any trouble. On the inside, life was different. Under a placid exterior I existed in a wet grey fog, never quite sure of what was happening around me.

Would you have realized I was dissociated? After all, unlike Precious I didn’t live in a slum. My family was affluent. They were respectable, professional people. My grandfather who sexually abused me was a proper, distinguished lawyer.

Anyone seeing Grandpa and me together in his downstairs library where leather-bound books lined the walls, would have found the scene charming. As a little girl I spent many hours a day with Grandpa while he was reading or playing Solitaire on his pedestal table. In my attempt to join him, although I had not yet learned to read, I would haul a huge tome off the shelf and pretend to be studying it.

Every once in a while I would ask him the meaning of some nonsense word of many syllables. Grandpa would observe me in all seriousness.

“How do you spell it, Mary Kay?”

I would list off a string of my favourite alphabet letters, and a serious discussion would ensue before Grandpa returned to reading his books.

Once a week, Grandpa and I took a slow walk to the library – the old man with his fedora, walking cane and an armful of books, and the little girl with the long blonde curly hair and a big bow tied at the back of her short dress. It must have been a touching sight. Grandpa always took out four new books a week.

Certainly in those days there was no one to tell because back then nobody “knew” that child sexual abuse even existed.