12 - Sexual Abuse at School, Oblivious Parents/Adults

©Miriam A. Mason

[Note here, I had so much trouble writing this all out. I didn't realize how I still held it in. Stirs up a lot of triggery stuff for me, a lot of mixed emotions, but it's the first time I've felt sadness for the small person I was. Instead of anger at the people who didn't protect me, or want to ask me what was happening and who were actually angry at me for having these experiences. If it's triggering me, it might trigger you, too. So trigger warning.]
 
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There was complete neglect and denial of daily sexual abuses during my 4th grade year at school. I think it had profound effects upon me, and I still struggle with the after effects of what I describe here.  I'm having trouble finding appropriate pictures.  Here's my 4th grade picture, hiding my braces and a lot of other things, too:

4th Grade School Picture of me.

There is some background needed here. I wasn't the only girl who suffered this abuse. To date, I have seen none of them come forward, at least to my knowledge. In my first year of school in the first grade, Berkeley decided to integrate the schools. The primary years, K-3, the kids from tough West Berkeley would be bussed to our school. I didn't think about it, honestly, I had friends who were black and friends who were white.
 
But then we were bussed into West Berkeley for the 4th-6th grades. Suddenly this pale, blonde, blue-eyed girl had a target on her back, particularly in the 4th grade. There was the matter of being unable to go the bathrooms safely at school while in the playground, because there were girls sitting on the tops of all the doors, stopping you from going in, slamming you into the doors using their feet against the walls to push you over with the door. In addition to that, any free toilets had shit smeared all over them so you couldn't sit down on them. I have had chronic gut issues my whole life, including as a child (another blog, another time). I learned to hold it in all day long. This has had both physical and psychological long-term effects on me. (Duh.) 

Source: https://www.facebook.com/DomesticViolenceKills

There was the matter of being a doll in the playground. One girl would grab me and want to brush my hair and another would come along and throw me on the ground and chastise the other girl for wanting to brush my hair, or even touch me at all. I was just a doll.
 
I more than got the message. They were really angry. And actually, they had every right to be angry. But there are ways of coping with anger that the school system simply ignored. They ignored what happened at every turn, all the adults. It was covered up, or neglected. It was the most broken school system during those years when we were supposed to be coming together.
 
I am angriest at my parents for not paying attention at all. I was suddenly in what felt like a concentration camp. I had all the stresses that entails. There were no safe hiding places. No safe places to eat, no safe places to go the bathroom, no safe places in the classrooms, no safe places in the halls, or walking to the buses.  Everywhere was a possible area to be attacked in.  I learned to be small then, too. And compliant. Or get hurt worse than I was being hurt already. 

Meanwhile, as a childhood friend who shared similar experiences, pointed out, our parents were sitting at home, drinking their scotch and sodas, in their entitled upper middle class white privilege, feeling really good about themselves, while their children were in the trenches, battling in a war they didn't even know they were in, getting beat up, bloodied, and profoundly hurt, sight unseen.  That's sort of the pinnacle of narcissism and disregard for the experiences of children.  My friend's mother was willing to hear her daughter as an adult, and feels a deep regret.  This is called functional parenting.  My parents never would have.  They were too terrified of looking bad.  Too sick with NPD to be able to handle anything like what happened in the Berkeley School systems over those years.  It was all about them feeling good about themselves.  Anything that happened to me I must have invited upon myself, according to their world view. 

For this, my parents cannot be forgiven.  It is disgusting and inexcusable and nobody was doing any kind of "best they could" at all.  That's the biggest lie of lies.

The first teacher I had that year for 4th grade was certifiably crazy, probably a full-blown psychopath. In one instance, she made two girls who didn't like each other (both of them named Tina) physically fight one another in the classroom as the rest of us had made a circle of desks around them and were supposed to watch as they hurt each other. Blood was drawn that day. It was like Roman bread and circuses.  Which kid could draw more blood and hurt the other kid the most?
 
She regularly played favorites and would reward what she thought the best assignment was by announcing it to the rest of the class and giving the winner candy in front of us.  She pitted us against one another in assignments and discussion, so the classroom would be ripe for another type of abuse.

 

Source: https://www.facebook.com/DomesticViolenceKills

She created these sessions she referred to as "circles" in which one student would be singled out by another student, and then be forced to sit in the center of a circle while all those with complaints about them aired them openly, and the center repeatedly asked things like "why did you do that?" and "you know that is wrong." and other admonishments, regardless if the accusations were true or not. We were 4th graders. Many complaints weren't true at all. Invariably the center of the circle would be so hurt, they'd be moved out of her class, usually requested by their parents, sometimes requested by the attackers in the circle.
 
I became the center of one of those circles against a couple of girls who hated me. Others who I had trusted joined in the chorus, because that is what all of we apes do in crowds, we join the majority where it is safe. It crushed me. It was a burden for my parents, who, once they understood, took all their energy into firing this woman and never allowing her to work with children again. (The irony there is that she then worked with "remedial"' children... or children with special needs... like mine, because clearly... they didn't matter at all.)
 

Source: https://www.facebook.com/DomesticViolenceKills

I remember one of the friends who'd joined in with the apes against me had been my best friend. I had truly loved her. A few weeks later, she came up to me and put her hand on my shoulder and said, "you were so right about them." Not an apology or anything. I said nothing. I walked away and let her hand fall. I was so deeply broken and unheard. After the circle, it was too late for "you were rights."  

[I want to make a note here, and it is with no satisfaction that I say it, for we were all victims of a terrible merciless system, and often horrific parenting -- as in my case.  But the girl who initiated the circle against me, ended up a heroin addict, living off and on on the streets of Berkeley.  At least the last time I bumped into her.  She was not a well person, as I couldn't really make out anything she said very well, and she seemed to totally forget what she had done to me, and was hanging on me as though we were old time friends.  We were not.  Not ever.  As a child she would be characterized as a mean person, and not someone I ever really wanted to be close to.  I feel deeply sorry for her situation.  She must have had it even worse than I did for her to hurt herself so badly as an adult.]

I was transferred to another teacher as my parents went through gyrations to get this first teacher fired. I was transferred to a class that didn't have things like circles, but it had something else. It had boys that were bigger and would take me (and other small fair girls) and throw them onto the hard floor, jump on top of them, and go through the motions of a dry rape.  The boys referred to it as "doing the pussy."  Over and over and over again, every day, any time they caught you behind the coat rack, or the teacher left the room, often three or four times a day. And you knew, if you said something, they would hurt you worse. They punch you in the face, many many times.  They choke you.  They slam your head repeatedly against a floor or wall.  10 years old.  All of this was done to me (and other girls) multiple times a day.  Every single school day.
 

Source: https://www.facebook.com/DomesticViolenceKills

I tried to tell both my mom and the teacher what was happening. I couldn't articulate it except to say the boys were touching us in ways that I didn't like. You know what they both said to me? "Oh, just ignore it. They'll stop." But they never did. And when I told the truth about some crayons once, without realizing it was the bully I was speaking about (I didn't think twice, it was just the truth), he beat me up every day for two weeks. I'd slink along the walls of the hallways just trying to disappear.
 
No adults watching. No help from any adults around. No bathrooms, nothing but cement and metal and violence. No noticing from my parents. Later psychological responses and "irrational" fears would be blamed on me and I would be shamed over them without them ever knowing the truth.
 
I am angry still about this. I'm not angry at the kids who did it. I'm angry at the school system for being utterly incompetent and not noticing. I'm furious at my parents, who utterly ignored and neglected to act on any signs that I was being seriously injured at this school. Nothing. "Ignore it."
 
I caught the stomach flu during the 4th grade year. It was scary to me and I felt out of control when I threw up and my mother griped at me because I missed the bucket and got the blanket instead.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/pages/After-Narcissistic-Abuse-There-is-Light-Life-Love/114835348601442

In the 5th grade, I developed an extreme phobia to vomiting, and thought I would throw up every single day. I was obsessed with it and I begged to stay home from school, I did a lot of my school work at home, as much as I could, I felt sick all the time. I had internalized the entire previous year. I had equated the loss of control of my sexual boundaries with that of losing control of my stomach, and with the fear of returning to school the next year. It all got mangled up into a terrifying phobia which paralyzed me throughout 5th grade.
 
My parents didn't want to hear about it. They blamed me and told me something was wrong with me and I needed to talk to a psychologist, and they sent me to one (more below on that). My mom also took me to a doctor who tried to give me something that would make me throw up to "get over your fear." I flat out refused. This was not helpful. I needed a feather and my parents were using a sledgehammer.
 
My brother was in absentia doing drugs and my sister was busy fighting her own demons around my parents. The phobia I developed was I imagine the only way I could express my need to be away from the school I was in and the extreme horrific painful violence that accompanied it. Articulating it to my folks wasn't possible.  I couldn't even articulate it to myself.  And my folks were not anxious to hear anything that caused them any more additional stress.  The circle thing had finished them out for the year.  They were done with me having complex troubles.

 

There was no safe place. My parents impatiently told me day in and day out and I wouldn't throw up so I shouldn't worry. They allowed me to stay home, but they didn't like it and they let me know it. It never occurred to them to ask me if there was a reason, or to gently offer me a safe place to tell them what had actually happened. Listening wasn't something they could do. They truly did not want to hear it.
 
The truth is they were terrified, both of my emotions and of the possibility that they could be responsible for seriously hurting their own child, or allowing their own child to be hurt. It was emotionally too much for them. At a great cost to me. They had put me in this giant experiment and then they'd turned their backs on me.
 
In fact, the things I experienced at school seemed to validate my parents idea of me. I was bullied and beat up later as well, having already been in this role too young. In junior high I asked for simple emotional support from a "friend" (a sociopath, then and now) to which she responded by writing my family's phone number on all over the bathroom walls along with "slut," spreading rumors and lies about me to an enormous school of 3000 kids, so much so I had to stop going, and it forced us to change our phone number. 

I was a vulnerable kid, with no safe space, and the predatory kids knew it. I was looking or some sort of support where there was zero at home and not finding it in the perilous members of my ill-developed peers. They also knew it was more likely my mom would yell at me about anything that happened than listen or back me up in any way. At 12, before I totally shut down, I was already so beat down and beat up, that I was easy prey for such a violent school system.
 
My parents repeatedly implicated that my difficulties were a result my character, my badness, my emotional brokenness, rather than the fact that I had blond hair and blue eyes and was in a newly integrated school system in the early 1970s. I was just broken, that's all. 

As above, during all the school violence and the phobia, my mother decided something was really wrong with me and sent me to a psychologist. The psychologist was not at all supportive of me, and after a few appointments, I begged not to go. All she did was point out my character flaws, like my mother on steroids. My mother's response to my pleading to stop was, "you call her and tell her, then." Even though my mother had been the one to decide I needed to go, set up the appointments and made me go. I had to call the office myself and cancel my appointments. Just another chip to add to my ever-growing pile of shame and failure.
 

“The mother gazes at the baby in her arms, and the baby gazes at his mother's face and finds himself therein... provided that the mother is really looking at the unique, small, helpless being and not projecting her own expectations, fears, and plans for the child. In that case, the child would find not himself in his mother's face, but rather the mother's own projections. This child would remain without a mirror, and for the rest of his life would be seeking this mirror in vain.” ~ Donald Woods Winnicott

I bounced somewhat back during the 6th grade when I had the most wonderful teacher. She was the best and I finally felt safe in her classroom at that school. And then again after the junior high incident, I moved to a small high school, one in which everybody knew everybody else. And after a quiet first year there, I made friendships and had experiences that helped me heal profoundly. It was never really safe at home. But school, at least, was pretty safe for those 3 years.

People do all sorts of things to avoid feeling the pain of abuse.  They compartmentalize, they disassociate, they bury and try to forget, they get physically sick, they have inexplicable bouts of extreme anger, they project, they deny.  I believe I've done some of everything in this list.  But it's time to stop those things and speak the truth.  Finally to set myself free.

Source: https://www.facebook.com/pages/After-Narcissistic-Abuse-There-is-Light-Life-Love/114835348601442

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