To get highly irritated by how adult victims of child abuse are portrayed by media

[TodaysGood]

Every police programme I see, every crime drama, every sob story drama seems to centre around an adult perpetrator who was screwed up due to being abused as a child. There seems to be this link which is impossible to shake that being abused screws you up for life. Please don't think for one minute I am under stating the impact abuse can have, and for some people it does have very profound long term impacts, I would never deny that but I do get annoyed by the assuming portrayal of victims of child abuse becoming adults and being unstable and more often than not perpetrators of crime.
I am a victim of abuse, it was prolonged and frequent sexual abuse over a period of many years, and resulted in rape. The abuse was revealed and due to a supportive network the perpetrator (a family member) was prosecuted and I moved on. I had my issues, I dealt with them and I now am a successful academic,happily married, two beautiful children and a very happy life. Please don't think anyone reading this who has been through awful things in life and struggling to deal with it, that I am trying to suggest people should just get over it - that isn't what I am saying at all. I just feel the media use the stereotypical image of victims of abuse with many pre-judgements and as such many people who have not experienced these things are led to believe that such abuse is the defining feature of some-ones life. there is only one reason I don't openly share my experiences and that is that when I have people see the label of 'victim of abuse' and assume many things about me or how I feel without ever bothering to consider that may be it is simply a black area of an otherwise colourful and bright picture, and I don't think media outlets and tv shows help this!

Ending up with mental health/addiction/criminal justice problems doesn't mean that that person was weaker/not trying hard enough to get over it/using their childhood as an excuse etc.

No body is suggesting this. My own mother not only suffers from the physical scars, she also suffers from mental health issues and depression following the brutality she lived with for a very long time. I can assure you my mother isn't a weak woman! The thread is about how we are portrayed in the media. I personally believe it would be advantageous for abused victims and survivors to hear positive outcomes.

Certainly what I am saying is there are people that live with an abusive past that have not ended up as per the media stereotype.

I think one possible outcome of abuse is being quite harsh towards oneself. This can be necessary as a survival technique. Perhaps it's less useful if one turns that harshness outwards.

'I survived. You could have done too, if only you tried a little bit harder.'

I think it's also important to take economics - and geography - into account. If you have a reasonably well paid job and live in a city where there are are lots of practitioners offering support for survivors of abuse, it may feel relatively easy to access help.

If you are low paid, and live in a rural area - or a place where services are being cut (as many services are) - it's rather less easy.

Lazy writing sadly. I watch Criminal Minds, in some cases the UnSub's history affects them because it's abusive but equally there are UnSub's showered with love, have everything in the world, hiding in plan sight and just plan fucked up because they are considered average. Sometimes there's just no reason either other then the UnSub just enjoys hurting for hurtings sake.

People like to be able to show reasons why someone is an arsehole, abusive, a sociopath or psychopath and to explain motive and for some writers relating that to the past is the best way to do that. Mainly because our past can fuel us- however our past doesn't mean childhood or adult abuse, our past could be something as simple as 'she cut me off in the fast lane' and now I want to kill her depending on the person. Unfortunately though, for some writers it's easier to break out stereotypes then explore reasons and options, including someone just actually really enjoying hurting with no past bad history and everything handed to them on a plate.

In a crime drama or show, it stands to reason that sometimes past abuse will be a reason - because for some it's true to life. But equally you have to show others who were abused not making that choice and others who weren't abused or have horrible history choosing to hurt others.

In some shows and books, I've seen past trauma used to excuse some really horrific things, which really does no favors. Sometimes there are mitigating factors which does make it understandable. People have choices though but often (for lazy writers) it's easier to portray them as not having the choice so the person appears more of a victim then a perp.

Coming at this from a slightly different angle.....could it be that when someone perpetrates a horrible crime on another person, we, as a society, want to delve into their past, want to find a reason there, because we don't want to believe that people can just be horrible, evil, creatures?

That if we can point to past abuse, and say "look, that's why they did it, because of what happened to them", then we can relax, and imagine ourselves as a law abiding, thoughtful and caring species, apart from a few "damaged" souls?
Apologies if I haven't explained it well, and I really don't want to upset any survivors here, I just wondered if that might be another reason.

she cut me off in the fast lane' and now I want to kill her

And that actually was a CM episode thinking about it. When you looked beneath the surface there were other factors in play, however those factors weren't being dealt with or even looked into by the guy and he simply took out his frustrations on those who pissed him off that day.

Dumpylump I think you hit the nail on the head. People are terrified of the unknown. If they can package and label and assign a reason, it's altogether less scary.

False thinking, but seems to happen a lot.

I can't speak for the OP Marianne, but, by my interpretation at least, that's sort of the point too - it's all about the lack of nuance; yes an abused child can grow up to be x, y and z, but, if a, b and/ or c intervenes, they can actually be pretty much 'just like anyone else' - flawed to average levels I suppose! It's about breaking the 'abused = messed up/ bad' linkage in people's minds. In my own circumstance I, like you, certainly had positive influences too, which will have helped enormously.

Sadly, I think to an extent it's true for some people. I'm very glad the person who abused you was prosecuted. My ex boyfriend was sexually and physically abused and raped as a child. It was also filmed so it's probably floating around on the internet somewhere. The main perpetrator was arrested but never charged. He was released and moved on to another family with children. You can only imagine how much that fucked up my ex, knowing this man was probably abusing other children yet there was nothing he could do about it. He never received any therapy or anything along those lines. In fact, his family didn't know about the sexual abuse, only about the physical stuff. Apparently, his family were told there wasn't enough conclusive evidence that he'd been sexually abused and he couldn't verbalise what had happened to him.

I can imagine how frustrating it is for you that abuse victims are portrayed the way they are in the media. I think for some people sadly that is reality though. If the perpetrator is never convicted, if they don't have a supportive family etc. then it probably does ruin their life. That's certainly the case for my ex. The whole desire for revenge and the abuse pretty much defined his life. He told me he had nightmares every night from when he was a child up until his 30s. He thought about it every day. Because he's never received proper support or received justice he could never fully move on from it.

So I think in some ways YANBU in that the media probably deal with this issue in a not terribly enlightened way and in other ways I think YABU in that the damage done to people who don't have their abusers prosecuted or receive proper help it probably does haunt them for the rest of their life.

I've posted about this a few times on here but I know a woman who has worked with murderers and sex offenders and their families for a long time. She told me that the majority of the criminals she's worked with were abused as children or were from dysfunctional backgrounds. She told me about one case where the man as a child had a father who was a sex addict obsessed with porn and would regularly show porn to him and encourage him to masturbate to it. I think this involved some very hardcore, violent porn as well. When the son grew up he, unsurprisingly, had a hardcore porn addiction and later committed a sexual offence. He was clearly a sexual abuse victim yet now he's a sex offender as well. Is he evil? Who knows but I'm pretty sure what his dad did to him has fucked him up for life.

people that lived through abusive childhoods can and do go on to have positive and successful lives. That does not minimise anything.

Sadly, that's exactly what it does for those with an agenda to promote child abuse. "It never did me any harm" is the most shriekingly obvious example.

The legal academic, Helen Reece, who advised May on the CSE enquiry, is of the (influential) opinion that children who engage willingly in sex with adults are not harmed by the experience. She also said people are over-anxious about paedophilia, since the numbers of child sex murders are low.

In both those opinions, she reflects the views commonly held by sexual exploiters of children - that neither the emotional manipulation, nor incidental injury, are anything to worry about. This is just how criminals use successful survivor stories to minimise their crimes.

I work in MH. Worked in forensic MH for years too, in prisons and secure units and in the community with serious violent and sexual offenders. I am also a victim of rape and attempted murder as a teen ( if anyone recognises this it's because I've posted under different NN, MN is really the only way I talk about it!).

I'm 'ok' as in I have a successful life (to outsiders) but my professional life has shown that (and statistics back this up) that an enormous amount of addicts/prisoners/people with MH problems experienced abuse/trauma in childhood.

I (and others on this thread) prove that those traumatic early experiences do not have to result in a life of crime or addiction but for so many; it does.

My professional experiences have made me think that 'we' - the one's who somehow avoided the less desirable pathways in life are the exception rather than the rule. And it doesn't matter how we avoided it, we may have just been the 'lucky ones'.

I also know that I'm not 'ok'. I will live forever with the consequences of what happened to me and I lost the person I might have been if I hadn't been abused so awfully when I was little more than a child.

And I was attacked by a stranger and even though he raped and tried to kill me, a stranger is easier to 'deal with' I think. It wasn't someone who was supposed to love me or keep me safe. I didn't have to process the abuse of a loved one - but I've seen the confusion and damage that causes.

I don't tell anyone anymore about what happened to me because it does (IMO) change the way people view me. I went to one 'supportive group' for rape victims years and years after my attack. I was told (not in a mean way) that after hearing my story, the other women didn't feel like their story was bad enough - as if I 'trumped' everyone else's story so they felt too inhibited to share what happened to them as it wasn't 'as bad' as mine. So I didn't go again.

No, childhood abuse doesn't mean you end up as an abuser/criminal/addict but it often does. Like I said previously, 'we' as in the one's that are 'ok' are the exception rather than the rule.

No, we shouldn't always be viewed as victims or damaged and certainly not have it used against us (in court as an example used earlier) but I think that as a society we should think it does often fuck people up.

Because it does.

That's not to say I think it's helpful to portray us always as malicious criminals! But neither is it helpful to dismiss the real & lasting damage caused by child abuse.

I agree with the OP.

And yy to lazy scriptwriting and 'labelling'.

While it is true that many abusers where abused themselves, many abusers were NOT abused in their childhood and most abused children grow up not to abuse others, even if they have profound psychological/emotional sequelae from their upbringing themselves.

I am sorry for all of you who have survived difficult circumstances and abuse in your childhood and now have to face prejudice. That is entirely wrong and very unfair.

Garlic if I am totally honest I really couldn't care less what Helen advised May. I understand the excuses made by sex offenders and violent people. I didn't study it, I lived it! I also believe most people are intelligent enough to see through the BS offenders use as an excuse for their behaviour.

What I said was very personal. For me, it would have been great to have real life role models. People that had been through what I went through and come out the other end as positive, successful people. Unfortunately I did not have those experiences to reflect on because all you hear is the negative stories.

Please don't undermine what I said by using academics like Helen Reece. What I put on this thread isn't theory or third hand experience. I lived it!

Please understand I didn't mean for that to sound so aggressive. This is a subject I am very passionate about.

I lived it too. I only feel aggressive towards people who minimise, excuse or dismiss the effects of child abuse.

I feel happy for victims who received enough support to fully overcome those effects before imploding as adults.

I've been on both sides of this picture. I am very angry about what Reece said. I do care about the influence her views, and others like her, exert on our national approach to child abuse.

Garlic people like Helen Reece make my head want to explode. So I am sure you can understand how I felt see her name next to something so personal to me.

YY, Pea, I can ...

Nature vs nurture though isn't it? So if you're predisposed to a mental illness or addiction through genetics then experience childhood abuse and trauma you're essentially a bomb waiting to detonate. Not all psychopaths kill people but generally the ones that do were abused as children. Also some of these adults don't have any sense of 'normality', all they know is abuse and possibly addiction.

I'd say the majority of abused children who grow up able to move on, not hurt anyone else, not commit crimes etc had someone stable in their life to steer them in the right direction.

I say this as an abused child btw.

My impressions - based on my own personal experiences, those of a partner working in family law, and on several years volunteering on a helpline for abuse survivors - are these.

• That one of the biggest problems for people who have experienced repeated abuse from people within the family, is behaviours that are self-harming.
• These behaviours - heavy alcohol use, anorexia, cutting etc - are ways of coping with pain that can't easily be spoken about. However, these behaviours can also make it difficult to provide a stable environment for babies and children. So some abuse survivors might have children who would - for a time - be cared for by a relative and/or be the subject of care proceedings.
• The majority of survivors very much do not want to perpetuate abuse, because they know how damaging it is.
• Childhood abuse can cause difficulties in adult relationships.

I had the utmost respect for the people I spoke to on the phoneline. They might not be successful in material terms. They might not have high-powered jobs. But they were all seeking to find a way forward, after experiences that could easily have destroyed them.

Yy poo. I've worked with abusers - physical or sexual and some had happy childhoods and seemed to be some kind of bizarre aberration?.

But too many were abused themselves. Men who perpetrated violence who grew up watching Mum being battered and/ or lying in bed sobbing listening to Mum being raped. Or being sexually abused and raped themselves.

Men who watched Mum eating her dinner off the floor because she was treated like a dog. And so, so many things that I don't want to describe because they're too hideous.

And it's not an excuse but it is part of the 'formulation' of why they became the person they are. Yes, adults should make the right choices but if your childhood was about violence, abuse and pain it's difficult not to be a violent adult - particularly as a man. It is very difficult in my experience to talk about abuse as a man - all that gender shit about men not crying, being strong and not 'victims'.

TodaysGood

Sorry for late reply-this is the first chance I have had to get on MN today.

You weren't insensitive at all so please don't worry.

Hopefully I will be where you are some day.

for everyone on this thread who has suffered any kind of abuse in their past and best of luck for the future.