child sexual abuse. always knocks me. it's too much a part of too many people's stories. it's not what i'm a support worker for, and i never encourage women to talk about it. they almost never do in detail, only in passing to provide context. and considering i never ask specifically, there is probably a whole undersea iceberg of child sexual abuse as context that i don't hear about. i actually can't immediately bring to mind how it's fitted in this week. which i guess is unhealthy. i just remember a sense of anger and overwhelm while on the phone and during a face-to-face session, both this week. come on.
ok. the anger and overwhelm was to do with how ridiculously, unbearably, far-reaching a single act of abuse can be. ah yeah i remember now. a woman was telling me as a side-note that her mother had been raped as a young woman and how this had caused her serious mental health problems which had caused the woman speaking to me to become her mother's carer and how this had impacted on her education, life-chances, confidence and ultimately contributed to her being in an abusive relationship for multiple decades. this brought to mind something i read years ago in Inga Muscio's book, Cunt, which i shall go and dig out... (jeez, doing that link i've just seen that the second edition only has a foreword by derrick jensen! that dude gets everywhere)... yes, she's writing about the affect on her and her sister's childhoods and lives, of her mother having been raped by a stranger aged nine:
"A man could, feasibly, sacrifice his coffee break raping a woman [child. she was nine.].i'm sure there are other things lurking in my unconscious from these first days back at work, but that'll do for now i guess.
That woman would then spend her entire life dealing with it.
So would her daughters.
So would theirs.
This distibution of power is not acceptable."
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