Humanity Founded Upon Abuse Of Children

When I started using Twitter about two years ago, I met someone who is just as passionate as I am about protecting children from sexual preditors.  On Twitter, my friend calls herself BraveKidsVoices. Quite a few months ago, BraveKidsVoices shared an article with me which you will find at the following link:

http://bit.ly/9soLJK

Feel free to go and read the entire article for yourself. I warn you that if you are an incest survivor, this article may be triggering for you. That is part of the reason that I have taken so long to write my own blog post about this subject. The reading of this article is very difficult.  I still have not finished reading all of it myself. I will probably do a series of blog posts from this article. 

The title of the article is "The History of Child Abuse" written by Lloyd deMause is found in The Journal of Psychohistory 25 (3) Winter 1998.  BraveKidsVoices asked me to write this post, using this article, about incest as the most prevalent form of child sexual abuse. This post is my attempt to do that. I am not good with numbers - statistics, so much of this post will be direct quotes from Mr. deMause himself. I also think a part of me just does not want to acknowledge that incest is such a huge problem in our society and in the history of our world, it was much worse than today even. That is just so hard for me to take in. I hope that this series of posts will do away with my own denial in this area as well as any that you, as my reader, may be holding on to.  If you are an incest survivor like I am, we are not in a unique position of being just a small number of survivors, the figures from this article tell us that incest has been going on since the beginning of our history and that in many countries in the world, incest is an everyday occurrence for far too many children still today.

My title for this post comes from one of the first few paragraphs in Lloyd deMause's article.  ". . . the history of humanity is founded upon the abuse of children."  Mr. deMause goes on to say, "Just as family therapists today find that child abuse often functions to hold families together as a way of solving their emotional problems, so, too, the routine assault of children has been society's most effective way of maintaining its collective emotional homeostasis.  Most historical families once practiced infanticide, erotic beating and incest."

The conclusions that Lloyd deMause reaches from the many studies that he and his associates have done over the years says, ". . . the history of childhood has been a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken."  Over the centuries, children have been neglected and often treated cruelly by their parents.  Mr. deMause says,  ". . . children have been killed, rejected, beaten, terrorized and sexually abused by their caretakers."

Even though incest and other forms of child sexual abuse seems to be at epidemic numbers today, according to Mr. deMause - 30% of men and 40% of women have been sexually abused as children.  Mr. deMause's figures say that half of those were sexually abused by family members. 81% of those children were sexually abused before puberty, with 42% of that number being under the age of seven.  These figures came from adults who remembered their abuse in great detail and with great clarity.  These were adults with "conscious memories," not from someone who may have had fragmented, bits and pieces, of memories.  I have solid, detailed memories from the age of 11 - 17, what Mr. deMause's study would count as "conscious memories." Many more survivors would fall into the "fragmented" range of memories which means that they are not included in these statistics. 

Mr. deMause reached the conclusion that "the real sexual abuse rate for America is 60% for girls and 45% for boys, about half of these directly incestuous."

Outside of the United States, these figures are even higher.  Mr. deMause states that the further back into history one goes and the further away from the West that one goes, the worse the incidences of child sexual abuse become.  In many countries in the world, incest is routine among families. Fathers, brothers, uncles and grandfathers molest little girls.  Mothers, aunts, sisters, and grandmothers molest little boys.  India, China, Japan, the Near East and the Far East are just some of the countries that incest is prevalent in today.  Little girls are treated worse than little boys because in many countries, little girls are considered worthless with no value of any kind.  Often the little girls are killed or used as sexual objects by the men in their families.

This information comes from just the first few pages of this 24 page article.  Here is the link again for those of you who are brave enough to go and read more.

http://bit.ly/9soLJK

If you are like me, you had no idea that incest was so bad throughout history or even in our so-called modern world.  As more of us research and speak out about incest, more people will become aware.  Just becoming aware is a start but don't you dare stop with just awareness.  Do something to protect your children who can't protect themselves from sexual preditors. 

The internet is such a miracles for those of us who grew up before everyone had access to computers.  The internet is increasingly becoming more and more dangerous for our children.  Preditors have discovered the internet too and many use it to reach out to unprotected, unloved, inadequately supervised children.  These preditors reach out with attention to these shy children who are often left at home alone because both parents have to work or have activities that seem to be more important to them than time spent with their children.  Please, as a caring parent, monitor your child's time on the computer. Let your child know that you love them and will do whatever is necessary to protect them from sexual preditors, online and off.
Patricia