Cousins Too
As the latest SAAM (Sexual Assault Awareness Month) draws to a close, I have some last-minute thoughts, and some personal history, to share.
One of the many, many reasons that people don’t talk about sexual abuse during the eleven remaining months is the endless confusion over terminology. How can anyone attempt to solve a problem when no one agrees how to describe it? As a professional writer who is also a sexual abuse survivor, I have heard, and taken part in, what seems like endless discussions as people attempt to describe what sexual abuse is, and what it is not. My friends at CAASE use the term “sexual harm,” which I agree is broader. They deal with the legal issues surrounding sexual harm and violence, and this works for them. My friends at Resilience Chicago use the phrase “sexual violence” more than I do, and I agree that this term is useful because it includes both survivors of adult-on-adult rape as well as childhood sexual abuse. I, however, have called myself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse for over thirty years now, and I doubt I’ll be changing that up much. Technically, however, since the person who abused me was a family member, I am a survivor of incest.
Incest. Now there’s a term that causes even more confusion. The average person who hears this word thinks of father-daughter incest. Most of us can cite a case or two in recent memory, such as John and Mackenzie Phillips, and Woody Allen and his daughter Dylan Farrow. However, incest is much more than that.
My friends at IA define incest as “the sexual abuse of a person by a family member: a primary caregiver, including a stepparent or foster parent, a sibling or cousin, or someone else considered family, like a nanny or close friend.” In other words, a family member, or someone who is trusted as a family member or caretaker, by the child being abused. Notice, also, the inclusion of “a sibling or cousin.”
I was abused by my cousin. He was five years older than I was, and my mother left me in the care of his mother until she considered me old enough to stay home by myself. The episodes of abuse began when I was six, and continued until I was fourteen, which meant that my cousin abused me from the time he was eleven until he was nineteen. He also abused me at night when my mother and I stayed at their house for a day or two. My mother and aunt slept in one bedroom, and I was put into his.
For most of the first half of my life, I would never have described his “games” with me as sexual abuse. Even as they increased in frequency and intensity. A child can only measure her reality against what she knows, and if you grow up with abuse, you have no idea what’s really happening. As an adult who began to experience unexplained nighttime anxieties in my thirties, I remained confused. I was beginning to compare my experiences to other women I knew who had been abused, and trying to figure out who abused me and when. I had two uncles on my mother’s side who were excellent candidates, as they both had histories of alcohol abuse and family violence. But I grew up in Connecticut, and later moved to Indiana, and one of those uncles was on the West Coast. The other was closer by, but we didn’t have much to do with him.
Sometime in the mid-90’s, my husband and I drove from Chicago over Thanksgiving to join my parents at my aunt’s home. Her son, my cousin, decided to drive there as well, with his latest girlfriend in tow. I hadn’t seen him for almost twenty years. On the drive home, it all flooded over me.
It was him. All along. He was the abuser. During all the time I had been trying to figure out what had happened to me, I was looking in all the wrong places. Like most of the world, I thought sexual abusers were fathers, stepfathers, uncles, or grandfathers. OLDER family members. Not siblings, and certainly not cousins. Dirty OLD men.
Here is something from a page about child-on-child sexual abuse (COCSA) which was sent to me by my friend Jo Lauren at Incest AWARE:
“Up to 70% of childhood sexual abuse is perpetrated by another child.” And it’s on the rise.
Here is something from the website defendyoungminds.com:
“Harmful sexual behaviors may:
Take place between children at least two years or more apart in age
Continue despite parenting strategies such as discipline
Cause harm or potential harm (physical or emotional)
Simulate sexual acts or sexual acts popularized in pornography.”
My cousin began his “games” by sharing pornography with me. This was way back in the 60’s, so that meant Playboy magazines and James Bond novels. Very tame, compared to what’s available to children on the Internet now. But it served its purpose. It prepared me for all the “games” that came later.
For years, even as I became an outspoken advocate for spreading awareness about childhood sexual abuse, when describing my own experiences, I used the phrase “older family member.” I was afraid that if I said “cousin,” people would trivialize and discount what had happened to me.
In 2013, at a fundraiser for The Zacharias Center, I met Erin Merryn, founder and president of Erin’s Law. Erin’s Law mandates the inclusion of prevention-oriented child sexual abuse programs in public schools. She was the keynote speaker, and afterwards I thanked her for sharing her story about being abused at the hands of a cousin. It was the first time I’d heard someone say that out loud.
Recently, my friend Char Rivette, Executive Director of Chicago Children’s Advocacy Center, was interviewed by Neil Steinberg and said, “The stats are that 90, 95 percent of children know their abuser,” said Rivette. “A lot of those folks are relatives or people close to the family. Mom’s boyfriend. A neighbor. Older cousins.”
So now I’m saying it, here and everywhere else. I was sexually abused by a male cousin who was five years older than I was. He used pornography to groom me, and it caused a great deal of emotional harm. For years I kept certain details quiet, to protect other family members, and to protect myself from people who I felt would trivialize, or even joke about, what had happened to me.
Those family members are all gone now. So is my cousin. He died almost two years ago, and I heard about it accidentally, from a family member who knew nothing about the situation. I wrote about that in a short essay I never published, called “When They Die.” As part of this April disclosure, I’m including a link to that here.
Incest AWARE has named April 15 as “Siblings Too Day,” and April 21 as “Incest Awareness Day.” Missed those dates this year, but better late than never. My personal Awareness month calendar will now include “Cousins Too Day” and “Jean’s Awareness Day.”
So what if it took almost 40 years? It’s never too late to heal.
Thank you to the folks at Incest AWARE for their assistance with my research, and for helping me remain aware.
