Child Sexual Abuse Survivor Quotes

When people ask me about what made the biggest difference in my healing, I tell them that I was believed and tremendously loved. I never felt blamed or shamed into silence. ~ Aishah Shahidah Simmons

Healing isn't just about pain. It's about learning to love yourself. As you move from feeling like a victim to being a proud survivor, you will have glimmers of hope, pride and satisfaction. Those are natural by-products of healing. ~ Ellen Bass

The experience of childhood sexual abuse leaves some survivors with a high tolerance for pain. Dysfunctional environments require endurance and thick skin. Child survivors sometimes have to commit to sticking things out in order to survive. This pattern of tolerance follows you into adulthood. Instead of using pain as a signal to evaluate and change direction, you may use pain as a signal to try harder. Try harder to please someone. Try harder to control your children. Try harder to be a good friend. Try harder to be successful at a job that you hate. You remain in survival mode that you picked up as a child. Your high tolerance for pain keeps you committed to dysfunctional experiences and relationships that recycle pain from the past. Sometimes, the only way out of this cycle is time in isolation to learn what peace feels like. Sometimes you have to be willing to let go of everything in order to learn how to hold onto anything. ~ Rosenna Bakari

A lot of attention has been given over to the Catholic Churches sexual abuse of children in their care, but this attention seems to have been hijacked by the media and has overshadowed the many thousands of victims that endured physical abuse. ~ Stephen Richards

I was becoming a product of society, a hardened juvenile! Now I was becoming rebellious and hateful. ~ Stephen Richards

Most of our informants [incest survivors] remembered their mothers as weak and powerless, finding their only dignity in martyrdom. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

As survivors, we've been conditioned to be victims sexually. Many of us have never learned to say no or to set limits on our sexual activities ... To heal, it's important that we take control, that we make active choices concerning if, when, and how we want to explore sexuality. Especially in the beginning, you need to put your own needs about sex ahead of anyone else's. ~ Ellen Bass

Many survivors have such profound deficiencies in self-protection that they can barely imagine themselves in a position of agency or choice. The idea of saying no to the emotional demands of a parent, spouse, lover or authority figure may be practically inconceivable. Thus, it is not uncommon to find adult survivors who continue to minister to the needs of those who once abused them and who continue to permit major intrusions without boundaries or limits. Adult survivors may nurse their abusers in illness, defend them in adversity, and even, in extreme cases, continue to submit to their sexual demands. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

Just as much as the media portray child sexual exploitation as being a 'hidden' crime, then that is no less of a case with child physical abuse. ~ Stephen Richards

From spending ten years in hell and coming to this regime of kindness was a shock. It was so much of a shock, it was unbelievable. I was like an untamed animal, I couldn't accept it and I just wouldn't accept it. ~ Stephen Richards

You might think the Bangkok Hilton (the nickname of a fictional prison in Bangkok) was tough, well that was paradise compared to this place! ~ Stephen Richards

When we first begin to take power more directly, after long having kept our relationship to it underground...it is natural that we experience anxiety, even guilt, at putting ourselves first. These feeling let us know we are taking action; they do not need to stop us. ~ Maureen Brady

Incest is almost always a devastating experience for
the victim. ~ Susan Forward

With regards pedophilia I have always looked on it as that ... pedophilia. I thought that one religion is no different to the other and I am now truthfully beginning to think that. ~ Stephen Richards

From a young boy's viewpoint this could not get any worse, especially when you were told that you belonged to the devil, and this bullying of me went on for a long time. ~ Stephen Richards

I dived out of the office and I was gone ... hitting these fields like a mad March hare. This wasn't Born Free, it was RUN FREE! ~ Stephen Richards

Shame plays a huge part in why you hate who you are. ~ Angel Ploetner

Zack was confident he secured a verdict against the priest. He was frantic that his efforts would fall short against the true financial source, the church. What good is an uncollectible seven or eight-figure verdict? ~ Mark M. Bello

You hold the ability to choose to heal and to recuperate. This power is in your hand alone ~ Patricia Dsouza

But why? Who would do such a thing?" Jennifer puzzled, astonished.
"I'm not sure yet who they are or exactly what their function is. My sense is they minimize the impact of these kinds of events and limit damage to the church," Rothenberg surmised.
"You have got to be kidding! ~ Mark M. Bello

In the wake of prevalent child rape and child abuse cases reported and unreported; Infliction of "Death Penalty" for child rape irrespective of the degree of offence or homicide , and rigorous penalty for child molestation, would serve as an excellent deterrent mechanism
Debates on Human Rights to the perpetrator of the crime on the question of infliction of death penalty should be cordoned off taking into consideration the aftermath of sexual assault /rape of a child exposed to the Pandora's pack of resilience ~ Henrietta Newton Martin B.Com LLB Goldmedalist LLM Goldmedalist MMS Etc - Legal Consultant

Can't a lawyer take his client out to dinner to discuss the case? Haven't you ever heard of the two-martini lunch?"
"Yes, but this is dinner," she corrected.
"It's the same thing. I looked it up in my Etiquette and Tax Deductions
for Lawyers handbook . . . ~ Mark M. Bello

Accept yourself as you are, by recognizing that you will not continue to remain this way forever ~ Patricia Dsouza

The initial trauma of a young child may go underground but it will return to haunt us. ~ James Garbarino

Everyone heals in their own time and in their own way. The path isn't always a straight line, and you don't need to go it alone. ~ Zeke Thomas

You are full of empathy, kindness, and caring because you very well know the value of love. ~ Patricia Dsouza

Fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct, probation, no jail time . . . He knew fourth degree meant simple 'touching.' What was wrong with simple touching? Why would anyone be sent to prison for that? Ridiculous! ~ Mark M. Bello

So here is what I see when we reclaim the church ladies: a woman loved and free is beautiful. She is laughing with her sisters, and together they are telling their stories, revealing their scars and their wounds, the places where they don't have it figured out. They are nurturers, creating a haven where the young, the broken, the tenderhearted, and the at-risk can flourish. These women are dancing and worshiping, hands high, faces tipped toward heaven, tears streaming. They are celebrating all shapes and sizes, talking frankly and respectfully about sexuality and body image, promising to stop calling themselves fat. They are saving babies tossed in rubbish heaps, rescuing child soldiers, supporting mamas trying to make ends meet halfway around the world, thinking of justice when they buy their daily coffee. They are fighting sex trafficking. They are pastoring and counseling. They are choosing life consistently, building hope, doing the hard work of transformation in themselves. They are shaking off the silence of shame and throwing open the prison doors of physical and sexual abuse, addictions, eating disorders, and suicidal depression. Poverty and despair are being unlocked - these women know there are many hands helping turn that key. There isn't much complaining about husbands and chores, cattiness, or jealousy when a woman knows she is loved for her true self. She is lit up with something bigger than what the world offers, refusing to be intimidated into silence or despa ~ Sarah Bessey

Some Survivors get angry at having to work at recovering from sexual abuse. They feel that it is unfair. They suffered all their life because of what someone else did to them: why do they have to suffer any more pain? This anger of "having" to do something is similar to the anger they felt at "having" to put up with the abuse. ~ Beverly Engel

Not even Carol knows firsthand how it feels to be hurt in such a way by someone who's supposed to protect you ~ Ellen Hopkins

You are unique, special and exceptional as you have made it. ~ Patricia Dsouza

Recovery unfolds in three stages. The central task of the first stage is the establishment of safety. The central task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning. The central focus of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

Every night, around midnight GMT, the Sun sets on the Cayman Islands, and doesn't rise over the British Indian Ocean Territory until after 1:00 a.m. For that hour, the little Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific are the only British territory in the Sun. The Pitcairn Islands have a population of a few dozen people, the descendants of the mutineers from the HMS Bounty. The islands became notorious in 2004 when a third of the adult male population, including the mayor, were convicted of child sexual abuse. As awful as the islands may be, they remain part of the British Empire, and unless they're kicked out, the two-century-long British daylight will continue. ~ Randall Munroe

Self-recovery is not a quick repair and does not take place overnight ~ Patricia Dsouza

In a series of three studies, the offenders who claimed they were abused as a child were 67 percent, 65 percent, and 61 percent without the threat of a polygraph. With polygraph (and conditional immunity), the offenders who claimed they were abused as children were 29 percent, 32 percent, and 30 percent, respectively. The polygraph groups reported approximately half the amount of victimization as children as the nonpolygraph groups did.
Nonetheless, the notion that most offenders were victims has spread throughout the field of sexual abuse and is strangely comforting for most professionals. ~ Anna C. Salter

You are not the darkness you endured.
You are the light that refused to surrender. ~ John Mark Green

If someone thinks you're being dramatic or selfish, then they obviously haven't walked a mile in your shoes. It's not important for you to explain yourself. You get a pass here. Don't let anyone else try to saddle you with guilt or shame. If you need your space, take it. ~ Sarah Newman

Have dinner with me tonight. I can fill you in on my conversation with Micah."
"And if I say no?" She wouldn't have.
"Then, I'll keep my discussions with Micah to myself."
"Zack, that's bribery."
"Sue me. ~ Mark M. Bello

Victim-stancing - whereby the offender claims and believes that s/he is the real victim (one of the most prevalent sophistries in the false memory controversies) ~ Harvey L. Schwartz

Your voice, your past, your history, you can make a difference to the world. ~ Patricia Dsouza

This isn't about money. It's about justice and prevention, justice for my boys and those who came before them, and prevention for those who may come after. Your crap settlement does not alert the public and allows this animal to continue to violate children," Jennifer raged. "I will not stand idly by for a few bucks and permit this to happen to another innocent child. ~ Mark M. Bello

To forget and to repress would be a good solution if there were no more to it than that. But repressed pain blocks emotional life and leads to physical symptoms. And the worst thing is that although the feelings of the abused child have been silenced at the point of origin, that is, in the presence of those who caused the pain, they find their voice when the battered child has children of his own. ~ Alice Miller

I looked out the hall window across from me as I stood leaning against the wall, and saw the bars on the outside of the windows. The rain trickled down the reinforced misted milk-glass in a constant deluge of melancholy rivulets. It was getting cold - the shadows, the rising turbulent winds, the drifting red and orange leaves were returning once more. I tuned out the sounds of the doctors voices. Soon, I couldn't make out the words they were saying as definite signals meant to convey something. Their words became a dim humming, a song drifting along the periphery of my awareness. And it was then, I knew I would be able to leave. I would go back to my room and take out the violet silk dress, the monstrous talisman I had created, and I would look at it. I might give it away after all. I need to let her go for all the ghosts she carried within her every measured stitch. ~ ~Theresa Griffin Kennedy~

I had forgotten the fact that I had been raped, something no one would understand, how could anyone forget something as traumatic as being raped? ~ Stephen Richards

Because the child does not have the power to withhold consent, she does not have the power to grant it. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

I always thought of myself as being the unluckiest girl I knew. I was, I believed, a 'jinx' and I was 'jinxed', or so I thought! ~ Stephen Richards

She'll be angry," Kenny argued. "She'll be mad at me for not protecting Jake. That's my job."
Tough job for someone so young . . . ~ Mark M. Bello

I left the court feeling sure that Rose West would never walk free again. That thought made me happy. ~ Stephen Richards

When feminist women told the world that patriarchy promotes woman-hating, the response was that feminists were being too extreme, exaggerating the problem. Yet when men who knew nothing about feminism claimed that feminists were man-hating, there was no response from the nonfeminist world saying that they were being too extreme. No feminists have murdered and raped men. Feminists have not been jailed day after day for their violence against men. No feminists have been accused of ongoing sexual abuse of girl children, including creating a world of child pornography featuring little girls. Yet these are some of the acts of men that led some feminist women to identify men as woman-hating. ~ Bell Hooks

I knew I hadn't been the most innocent of victims, but I didn't deserve this. DC Smith stood and grinned at me as he thanked me and left the room, leaving me to cry and to ponder on his not very adept handling of the situation. ~ Stephen Richards

In the early 1990s, a group of people accused of sexual abuse formed the 'False Memory Syndrome Foundation' (FMSF). The FMSF's primary goal was to advocate on behalf of parents accused of child sexual abuse by their adult children, but the Foundation also became an important resource for people accused of sexual abuse by minors. Importantly, the Foundation attracted academics from a range of discliplines whose experise had been contested or challenged by the legitimisation of children's and women's testimony of sexual abuse. ~ Michael Salter

Are we interrupting your late-morning nap, Mr. Blake?" District Court Judge Emma Pearl inquired, with a harsh tone and an insistent expression. ~ Mark M. Bello

Emotional abuse can pose a threat to a person's psychological survival, particularly if that person is a child and if the emotional abuse is chronic and severe. Threat of abandonment is experienced by some as a threat to physical and/or psychological survival. This is particularly so if the victim is dependent on the person threatening abandonment, as a child may be. Incest is a form of physical and emotional abuse that threatens a child's psychological survival and sometimes even her or his physical survival. Extreme sexual or emotional abuse may produce fragmentation of identity, as in multiple personality, or psychic annihilation, as in psychosis. Threat to psychological survival can also occur, for example, when someone threatens to kill your children, when someone continues to sexually abuse your children and there is nothing you can do to stop it, or when someone prevents you from seeing your children. ~ Dee L.R. Graham

Some of your childhood traumas may be remembered with incredible clarity, while others are so frightening or incomprehensible that your conscious mind buries the memory in your unconscious. ~ Renee Fredrickson

Evidently, if support and care are devoted to an abused child at an early level of the occurrences, the long-lasting outcomes may be less cruel. ~ Patricia Dsouza

The real danger has always lived in my granddad's kind voice, his soft caresses. All of it masquerading as innocent, but really just a gateway drug for girls starved for affection, desperate for someone to love them. He doesn't force us with a heavy hand. He manipulates with a gentle touch, guides us exactly where he wants us to go. So in the end, we blame only ourselves. ~ Amy Engel

I am concerned about the growing problem of sexual abuse and exploitation of our children. ~ Jim Ryun

Sexual abuse is also a secret crime, one that usually has no witness. Shame and secrecy keep a child from talking to siblings about the abuse, even if all the children in a family are being sexually assaulted. In contrast, if a child is physically or emotionally abused, the abuse is likely to occur in front of the other children in the family, at least some of the time. The physical and emotional abuse becomes part of the family's explicit history. Sexual abuse does not. ~ Renee Fredrickson

Ritual abuse is highly organised and, obviously, secretive. It is often linked with other major crimes such as child pornography, child prostitution, the drugs industry, trafficking, and many other illegal and heinous activities. Ritual abuse is organised sexual, physical and psychological abuse, which can be systematic and sustained over a long period of time. It involves the use of rituals - things which the abusers 'need' to do, or 'need' to have in place - but it doesn't have to have a belief system. There doesn't have to be God or the Devil, or any other deity for it to be considered 'ritual'. It involves using patterns of learning and development to keep the abuse going and to make sure the child stays quiet.
There has been, and still is a great deal of debate about whether or not such abuse exists anywhere in the world. There are many people who constantly deny that there is even such a thing as ritual abuse. All I can say is that I know there is. Not only have I been a victim of it myself, but I have been dealing with survivors of this type of abuse for almost 30 years.
If there are survivors, there must be something that they have survived.
The things is, most sexual abuse of children is ritualised in some way. Abusers use repetition, routine and ritual to forced children into the patterns of behaviour they require. Some abusers want their victims to wear certain clothing, to say certain things. They might bathe them or cut them, they might burn them o ~ Laurie Matthew

In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called "The Aetiology of Hysteria." However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest.
Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the "Oedipus complex," which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women's and children's reports of mistreatment by men.
Once abuse was denied in this way, the st ~ Lundy Bancroft