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Child Sexual Abuse Quotes

Browse 273 quotes about Child Sexual Abuse.

Child Sexual Abuse Quotes

“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.”

Child Sexual AbuseAbuse SurvivorsChild Sexual Abuse SurvivorChild Abuse SurvivorsChild Sexual Abuse SurvivorsPain Tolerance
Author:Rosenna Bakari
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“There is a slave trade still in this country—yes, the real and horrific sex and human trafficking trade run by organised criminal gangs, which is appalling and must be stopped. But there's the hidden slavery too of children exploited and used within their own families, within organised and ritual abuse.”

AbuseChild Sexual AbuseIncestRitual AbuseHuman TraffickingSociety DenialChildhood AbuseTraffickingAbusive ParentsSex TraffickingOrganized AbuseDenial Of AbuseRitualistic AbuseSex SlaveHidden PainInstitutional AbuseSex SlaveryChild Sex RingChild Sexual ExploitationHidden AbuseRitualistic Child AbuseAbusive FamiliesRitualistic Sexual AbuseDebianSexual Explain
Book:Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices
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“I came to understand intellectually that my mind used dissociation as a way to protect me from knowing things. Dr. Summer repeatedly explained, "If you had woken up every morning and knew that later that day or evening you would be abused, you would have killed yourself". I would always nod, as if in agreement. It all made sense in a theoretical way, but I could not and did not want to truly understand or accept what had happened to me.”

Child AbuseDissociative Identity DisorderDissociationChild Sexual AbuseDissociative DisorderDissociative AmnesiaChild Abuse Survivor
Book:The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder
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“The framing of women’s abuse narratives as quasi-legal testimony encourages the public, as interpreters, to take the stance of cross-examiners who categorize forgetting as memory failure and insist on completeness and consistency of memory detail through all repeated tellings. The condensed, summarized, or fragmentary nature of abuse memories will rarely withstand this aggressive testing. Few people’s memories can.”

DisbeliefChild Sexual AbuseAbuse SurvivorsSociety DenialFalse MemoriesRecovered MemoriesTrauma MemoryMemory WarsInterpretationsCross Examination
Book:Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars
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“I started crying. "When will it stop hurting?" "I don't know. I wish I could tell you. I wish I could take the pain away. But it will get better and easier for you over time.”

GriefHealing QuotesEmotional PainChild Sexual AbuseHealing The PastHealing From AbuseRecovery From AbuseChild Abuse Survivor
Book:The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder
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“In the same way that the women's movement of the seventies and eighties brought rape and incest into public consciousness, we can do the same with the causes and reality of dissociation and multiplicity.”

Mental HealthChild AbuseDissociative Identity DisorderDissociationChild Sexual AbuseAbuse SurvivorsMultiplicitySurvivorsMultiple Personality DisorderIncestMultiple PersonalitiesMental Health StigmaTrauma SurvivorsDissociative DisordersRequire
Book:Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices
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“I finally had the courage to start talking about how I developed dissociation as a coping mechanism as a child and carried that through my life, I talked about being trained to initiate and accommodate abuse and about how these coping mechanisms carried over for me as a teenager and young adult.”

Dissociative Identity DisorderDissociationChild Sexual AbuseDissociative DisorderCoping MechanismChild Abuse SurvivorCoping Strategies
Book:The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder
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“The FMSF achieved prominence partly as a response to increased possibilities for women to institute criminal or civil proceedings that relate to historical abuse, and women do not often take their abusers to court. The foundation's framing of abuse serves an ulterior strategic purpose of constructing a narrative position that isolates the incest survivor in an adversarial setting of interpreter distrust and challenged.”

ManipulationChild Sexual AbuseMedia ManipulationFalse MemoriesUlterior MotiveFalse Memory Syndrome FoundationTrauma Memory
Book:Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars
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“Richard Gardner (2004), the creator of ‘‘parental alienation syndrome’’, considers that the ‘‘parental alienation syndrome (PAS) is primarily a disorder of childhood. The false memory syndrome (FMS) is a disorder of young adults, primarily women. They share in common a campaign of acrimony against a parent’’. In reality, these so-called syndromes are both used to discredit the testimony of individuals who claim to have been abused, sexually or otherwise. When adults report that they have recovered memories of childhood abuse, others may claim that they have false memory syndrome. When children do not repress or forget the abuse, if there is no period of amnesia, then some may claim that they have parental alienation syndrome (Ceci & Bruck, 1995; Dallam, 1999).”

Child AbuseChild Sexual AbuseFalse Memory Syndrome FoundationFalse Memory SyndromeTrauma MemoriesPatent Alienation Syndrome
Author:Jenny Ann Ryberg
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“Whatever proponents of false memory syndrome may claim and however persuasively they tell their stories and anecdotes, dissociative amnesia typically involves fragmented recall of trauma and is rather a retrieval inhibition than a forgetting (Spiegel et al., 2011). It may also involve complete loss of recall for sexual and physical abuse but most commonly, dissociative amnesia is partial, variable, and coexists with memories of trauma (Dalenberg et al., 2014). Studies addressing the accuracy of recovered abuse memories show that these memories are no less accurate than continuous memories for abuse (Scheflin & Brown, 1996). Memory is reconsolidated each time it is accessed and therefore potentially distorted (Bridge & Paller, 2012). Evidently, this does not disprove the possibility that some clinicians are too suggestive, one way or another, pushing their patients to adopt views that serve to confirm the therapist’s own perspective and beliefs.”

BiasChild Sexual AbuseDissociative AmnesiaRecovered MemoriesFalse Memory SyndromeFake AccusationsRaise Memories
Author:Jenny Ann Ryberg
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“What still frightens me is that society is fickle. There was a time when nobody believed in the reality of abuse, and now it seems that just about everyone does, and yet, I realize we could still move backwards. It is important to stay firm: It took many years for the truth about sexual abuse to come to the fore. It is still fragile, and must be constantly nourished by research, reflection and above all, listening with empathy and an open heart to the stories of people who have been the victims of child abuse in its many forms and are now survivors. They have much to teach.”

Mental HealthSexual AbuseChild Sexual AbuseChild Abuse SurvivorsPsychological TraumaDenial Of Child AbuseReality Of Abuse
Author:Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
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“It is a political fight between a group of well-financed, well-organized people whose freedom, livelihood, finances, reputations, or liberty is being threatened by disclosures of child sexual abuse and--on the other hand--a group of well-meaning, ill-organized, underfinanced, and often terribly naive academics who expect fair play.”

MemoryTraumaChild Sexual AbuseRepressed MemoriesFalse Memory Syndrome FoundationFalse Memory SyndromeMemory Wars
Author:Anna C. Salter
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“Women involved in out-patient treatment for substance abuse were interviewed to examine their recollections of childhood sexual abuse. Overall, 54% of the 105 women reported a history of childhood sexual abuse. Of these, the majority (81 %) remembered all or part of the abuse their whole lives; 19% reported they forgot the abuse for a period of time, and later the memory returned. Women who remembered the abuse their whole lives reported a clearer memory, with a more detailed picture. They also reported greater intensity of feelings at the time the abuse happened.”

Child Sexual AbuseSurvivorsRepressed MemoriesRecovered MemoriesTrauma MemoryRepressed MemoryChild Sexual Abuse SurvivorsRecovered Memory
Author:Elizabeth F. Loftus
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“Despite its popularity amongst critical criminologists, the empirical basis of the moral panic account of sexual abuse has been shown to be substantially untrue. There is no evidence of an increase in reckless or baseless sexual abuse prosecutions during the 1990s, which was supposedly the height of the “moral panic” (Cross, Walsh, Simone, & Jones, 2003).”

Sexual AbuseRapeChild Sexual AbuseWitch HuntMoral PanicRape MythsFalse AllegationsFalse Allegations Of Rape
Book:The History of Surrealist Painting
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“In the past, child abuse has been a problem without a solution, with distressing case after case accumulating in public awareness without apparent end. At least the ‘false memory’ narrative offered a potential, if illusory and damaging, resolution to this intolerable situation, in the (re)suppression of victim complaints.”

Child AbuseChild Sexual AbuseSociety DenialFalse MemoriesChild Abuse SurvivorsChild Abuse DenialSilencing OthersSilence The Accuser
Author:Michael Salter
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“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.”

Saying NoChild Sexual AbuseAbuse SurvivorsSurvivorsAbusive ParentsChild Sexual Abuse SurvivorTrauma BondingAbusive ParentBoundary Issues
Book:Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
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“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.”

AbuseChild Sexual AbuseHealing InsightsRepressed MemoriesAbuse RecoveryTrauma MemoryRepressed Memory
Book:Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries
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“If I, as a child, claim that something awful has happened—that someone has done something terrible to me—and everyone around me acts as if nothing is the matter, then either I must be crazy, or all of them are. And when you’re a kid and your life depends on all these people, there is no choice: of course, I must be crazy.”

CrazyInsaneChild Sexual AbuseIncestHealing InsightsDysfunctional FamilyDysfunctional FamiliesAbuse SurvivesIndanityThinking You Are Crazy
Book:Secret Survivors: Uncovering Incest and Its Aftereffects in Women
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“To heal from child sexual abuse you must believe that you were a victim, that the abuse really did take place. This is often difficult for survivors. When you’ve spent your life denying the reality of your abuse, when you don’t want it to be true, or when your family repeatedly calls you crazy or a liar, it can be hard to remain firm in the knowledge that you were abused.”

DenialChild Sexual AbuseSurvivorsIncestDysfunctional FamilyChild Sexual Abuse SurvivorRecovery From AbuseHealing Abuse
Book:The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse
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“During sexual abuse, children feel and incorporate the rage, pain, shame, and sense of perversion that the perpetrator is projecting. They take these feelings into the very core of themselves, and they are badly traumatized by the emotions surrounding the assault, as well as by the assault itself.”

RageProjectionChild Sexual AbuseAbuse SurvivorsSurvivorsHealing InsightsTraumatizedChild Sexual Abuse Survivors
Book:Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse
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“Sometimes buried memories of abuse emerge spontaneously. A triggering event or catalyst starts the memories flowing. The survivor then experiences the memories as a barrage of images about the abuse and related details. Memories that are retrieved in this manner are relatively easy to understand and believe because the person remembering is so flooded with coherent, consistent information.”

DenialAvoidanceChild Sexual AbuseAbuse SurvivorsSurvivorsHealing InsightsTrauma Memory
Book:Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse
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“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.”

HealingAngerChild Sexual AbuseAbuse SurvivorsSurvivorsHealing From Abuse
Book:The Right to Innocence: Healing the Trauma of Childhood Sexual Abuse: A Therapeutic 7-Step Self-Help Program for Men and Women, Including How to Choose a Therapist and Find a Support Group
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“Another question I am frequently asked is, "What do you mean by recovery?" It has taken me a while to answer that one. I had been depending on other people's definitions of recovery until I developed one that worked for me (just as you must come to one that makes sense for you.) Mine is simple. For me, it is about freedom. Recovery is the freedom to make choices in your life that aren't determined by the abuse. The specific choices will be different for each of you; the freedom to choose is your birthright.”

RecoveryChild AbuseChild Sexual AbuseSurvivorsHealing InsightsMale Survivor
Book:Victims No Longer: Men Recovering from Incest and Other Sexual Child Abuse
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“In my view, the spurning of DID is highly connected with knowing and not knowing about child sexual abuse. Side by side with denial of childhood trauma and of severe dissociation, is an unmistakable cognizance of dissociative processes as they are embedded in our language. We regularly say things such as, "pull yourself together", "he is coming unglued", "she was beside herself", "don't fall apart", "he's not all there", "she was shattered", and so on.”

DenialDissociative Identity DisorderDissociationChild Sexual AbuseSociety DenialMental Health StigmaDissociative DisorderDdnosInvalidationDissociative States
Book:Knowing, Not-Knowing and Sort-of-Knowing
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“Memory repression thrives in shame, secrecy, and shock. The shame and degradation experienced during sexual assault is profound, especially for children who have no concept of what is happening to them or why. Sexual abuse is so bizarre and horrible that the frightened child feels compelled to bury the event deep inside his or her mind.”

ShameSexual AbuseRepressionChild Sexual AbuseSexual AssaultRepressed MemoriesDissociative AmnesiaForgetting The PastForgetting The Pain
Book:Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse
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“You can avoid the issues from abuse for only so long. Sooner or later, the problems in your life cause you to either face it or go deeper into denial. Most of you will eventually be forced into admitting that it is indeed the sexual abuse that is the root of your problems. Even then, the tendency will be to ‘forgive and forget’ in the belief that by doing so the pain will be assuaged.”

Sexual AbuseChild Sexual AbuseAbuse SurvivorsHealing InsightsSurvivors Of Abuse
Book:The Right to Innocence: Healing the Trauma of Childhood Sexual Abuse: A Therapeutic 7-Step Self-Help Program for Men and Women, Including How to Choose a Therapist and Find a Support Group
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“Even with my bachelor’s degree, I still felt more comfortable at the strip club than anywhere else. And that feeling hit me the very first time I walked through those doors. While I initially starting dancing to avoid eviction, I stayed because I felt more at home in the strip club than I did in college, at church and at my parent’s. Not only was I accustomed to feeling degraded, I believed I didn’t deserve any better or that any man would treat me better than the men at the club.”

RapeChild Sexual AbuseStrippersSex AbuseExotic Dancers
Book:From Ivy League To Stripper Life: 10 Lessons Learned
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“Those years of anger weren’t just directed inward and towards others, I was also angry with God. As a kid, when I sang songs in the children’s choir and memorized verses in bible study, I was told there was a God who loved and protected us. He was a jealous God and could be angered, yes, but He always showed grace and mercy towards His people. I must not have been one of His people. He never protected me. As a matter of fact, I remember crying and pleading to God to make it stop when I was in DC being raped at five years old. I thought he heard my prayers when I moved to New Jersey. But when the abuse became worse and more frequent, it was easy for me to conclude God’s protection didn’t apply to me.”

FaithChristianityChild Sexual Abuse
Book:From Ivy League To Stripper Life: 10 Lessons Learned
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“Sometimes sex is the price that is exacted from her for warmth and attention. And if these sometimes wonderful moments of closeness must coexist with terrifying, confusing moments of abuse, she learns to see the two as parts of the same experience. She grows to think she wanted the incest itself. Because they’ve become enmeshed, she doesn’t know that it was love she wanted, not sex.”

Child Sexual AbuseAbuse SurvivorsIncestHealing InsightsEnmeshed
Book:Secret Survivors: Uncovering Incest and Its Aftereffects in Women
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“It is therefore perfectly plausible that memories of childhood sexual abuse could be buried for years and then recalled, and that motivated forgetting, dissociative amnesia, or some other mechanism could account for some of the allegations in cases that Loftus has testified in. But because of the way in which the entire debate has been framed around the issue of "repression" and "recovery," these nuances have been largely ignored.”

RepressionChild Sexual AbuseRepressed MemoriesDissociative AmnesiaRecovered MemoriesTrauma MemoryRecovered Memory
Author:Moheb Costandi
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“Although psychoanalysts, including Freud, tended to acknowledge sexual trauma as tragic and harmful (Freud, 1905b, 1917), the subject seems to have been too awful to consider seriously in civilized company. One notable exception, Sandor Ferenczi, presented a paper entitled “Confusion of Tongues between the Adult and the Child: The Language of Tenderness and of Passion” (1955), to the Psychoanalytic Congress in 1932. In this presentation he talked about the helplessness of the child when confronted with an adult who uses the child’s vulnerability to gain sexual gratification. Ferenczi talked with more eloquence than any psychiatrist before him about the helplessness and terror experienced by children who were victims of interpersonal violence, and he introduced the critical concept that the predominant defense available to children so traumatized is “identification with aggressor.” The response of the psychoanalytic community seems to have been one of embarrassment, and the paper was not published in English until 1949, 17 years after Ferenczi’s death (Masson, 1984).”

PsychologyChild AbusePtsdPsychoanalysisChild Sexual AbuseSociety DenialFreudPosttraumatic Stress DisorderSigmund Freud
Book:Handbook of PTSD: Science and Practice
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“The above is stereotypical FMS rhetoric. It employs a formulaic medley of factual distortions, exaggerations, emotionally charged language and ideological codewords, pseudo-scientific assertions, indignant protestations of bigotry and persecution, mockering of religious belief, and the usual tiresome “witch hunt” metaphors to convince the reader that there can be no debating the merits of the case. No matter what the circumstances of the case, the syntax is always the same, and the plot line as predictable as a 1920's silent movie. Everyone accused of abuse is somehow the victim of overzealous religious fanatics, who make unwarranted, irrational, and self-serving charges, which are incredibly accepted uncritically by virtually all social service and criminal justice professionals assign to the case, who are responsible for "brainwashing" the alleged perpetrator or witnesses to the crime. This mysterious process of "mass hysteria" is then amplified in the media, which feeds back upon itself, which finally causes a total travesty of justice which the FMS people in the white hats are duty-bound to redress. By reading FMS literature one could easily draw the conclusion that the entire American justice system is no better than that of the rural south in the days of lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan. The Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century are always the touchstone for comparison.”

AbuseChild Sexual AbuseMisinformationRitual AbuseSatanic Ritual AbuseWitch HuntFalse Memory SyndromeFmsfSalem Witch TrialsOverzealousCounter AttackSatanic PanicMass HysteriaRitual Abuse Myth
Book:Ritual Abuse in the Twenty-First Century: Psychological, Forensic, Social, and Political Considerations
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“The psychological impact of trauma in both the military and civilian arenas has been documented for well over 100 years [1], but the validity of the traumatic neuroses and their key symptoms have been continuously questioned. This is particularly true for posttraumatic amnesia and therapeutically recovered traumatic memories. Freud’s [2] abandonment of his seduction theory was followed by decades of denial of sexual trauma in the psychoanalytic and broader sociocultural realms [3]. Concomitant negation of posttraumatic symptomatology was noted in regard to the war neuroses, emanating equally from military, medical and social spheres [4]. Thus, Karon and Widener [5] drew attention to professional abandonment of the literature on posttraumatic amnesia in World War II combatants. They considered this to be due to a collective forgetting, comparable to the repression of soldiers, but instead occurring on account of social prejudices. He further noted that the validity of memories was never challenged at the time since there was ample corroborating evidence. Recent research confirms the findings of earlier investigators such as Janet [6], validating posttraumatic amnesia of both civilian and military origin. Van der Hart and Nijenhuis [7] cited clinical studies reporting total amnesia for combat trauma, experiences in Nazi concentration camps, torture and robbery. There is also increasing evidence for the existence of amnesia for child sexual abuse. Thus, Scheflen and Brown [8] concluded from their analysis of 25 empirical studies that such amnesia is a robust finding. Since then, new studies, for example those of Elliott [9], have appeared supporting their conclusion. This paper examines posttraumatic amnesia in World War I (WWI) combatants. The findings are offered as an historical cross-validation of posttraumatic amnesia in all populations, including those subjected to childhood sexual abuse.”

RepressionChild Sexual AbuseAmnesiaRepressed MemoriesDissociative AmnesiaRecovered MemoriesTrauma MemoryTraumatic Amnesia
Author:Onno van der Hart
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“Similarly unsubstantiated upon close examination is the claim that there is somehow a parallel between current concern over child sexual abuse and witch hunts of previous historical eras. The only similarity is the presence of children making accusations against protesting adults; and even here the parallel is limited, since most child sexual abuse victims do not eagerly disclose their plights. The witch-hunt analogy does not work for several reasons. In the past people became hysterial about witches because ignorance and lack of education led them to believe in a nonexistent evil, whereas current concern about child sexual abuse results from increased education and sophisticated research, and a growing body of medical and psychological proofs that validate the existance of a very real evil. Witch hunts flourished because the authoritative force of society, the Church, encouraged them and supported accusers. In our society, however, validation of child sexual abuse victims has occurred despite the failure of our authoritative force, the legal system, to encourage the abusers. Witches were tortured, hanged, and burned. Child abusers are rarely reported to authorities, and those who are seldom see the inside of a jail or even a psychiatrist's office. National statistics on child sexual abuse indicate, for example, that judges only see 15.4 percent of sexual abuse cases.(39)”

Child Sexual AbuseSociety DenialWitch TrialsAbuse DeniersWitch HuntsWithc Hunt
Book:On Trial: America's Courts and Their Treatment of Sexually Abused Children
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“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.”

Child Sexual AbuseIncestFalse MemoriesFalse Memory Syndrome FoundationFmsfAbuse Deniers
Book:Organised Sexual Abuse
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“Dissociation, a form of hypnotic trance, helps children survive the abuse…The abuse takes on a dream-like, surreal quality and deadened feelings and altered perceptions add to the strangeness. The whole scene does not fit into the 'real world.' It is simple to forget, easy to believe nothing happened.”

Mental HealthMental IllnessChild AbuseSurrealUnrealNumbDissociationChild Sexual AbuseAbuse SurvivorsSurvivorsNumbnessTrancePerception Of RealityUnrealityPerceptionsRepressed MemoriesDissociative AmnesiaTrauma MemoryDepersonalizationDissociatedTrauma MemoriesSurreal QuotesTrance StatesHypnotic TranceNumbness Quote
Book:Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse
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