First published in The Weekender July 31st, 2004 (A Times Of Malta Supplement)
Jenny: “My parents weren’t bad people, they just didn’t know what they were doing, was damaging their kids.”
Abuse is most commonly perpetuated at home. “We tell children not to talk to strangers or outsiders but worldwide statistics show that most people who carry out child abuse are within the family, relatives and friends.” Ruth Sciberras, Child Service Manager within Appogg states. The ones whose love we are allowed to trust, are the ones who hurt us most. But whereas physical abuse is self-evident and with sexual abuse there are indications which can be elicited, emotional abuse is much harder to detect. “Yet it causes as much harm as all other types of abuse”. The surface wounds may heal but the unkind remarks cut deep. To a certain extent everybody has suffered from some form of emotional abuse. With this exam fixated culture, look no further. What parents, teachers and coaches are perfect? Where do you draw the line? When does emotional abuse become pathological? Is it only when it is associated with physical abuse and aggressiveness?. Apparently so, when the name calling and derision is accompanied by flying objects, then it tends to get reported. Otherwise the emotional torment goes on unnoticed. Society a silent witness.
Emotional abuse is most easily uncovered in cases of Marital Separation and Domestic Violence (where the children aren’t actually hit but witness physical and emotional abuse). It comes to the attention of the CPSU (Child Protection Services Unit) because of certain behavioural traits observed in the classroom or through frustrated parents themselves who approach the CPSU complaining that their children are out of control. Being a social worker entails a certain amount of detective work. “There might be a display of physical abuse but you have to find out where it’s coming from” asserts Ruth, “There may be problems in the family between parents, this affects the children, they in turn ‘act-out’, the parent fighting an incessant battle to assert control, retaliates by lashing out at the kids.”
The effects of abuse may be more devastating than the abuse itself. Research conducted both locally and abroad is consistent in claiming that over 90% of all drug addicts suffered some kind of abuse as children. There is an accelerated statistical trend for survivors of abuse to commit suicide, have mental health problems or suffer from eating disorders such as Anorexia and Bulimia as teenagers and adults. Children may become withdrawn, aggressive, wet their beds and have nightmares as a result of abuse. Victims of sexual abuse may exhibit sexualised behaviour as kids and become promiscuous later on.
Child abuse occurs in all cultures, religions and social classes. Generally, child abuse is defined as an injury or pattern of injuries that is non-accidental. Child abuse is not usually one physical attack or just one failure to meet a child’s basic needs, but a pattern of behaviour, over a period of time with additive effects. Lisa, a victim, puts it quite aptly “unnaturally directing a child` from their natural flow to a path they naturally wouldn’t go on their own.”
Coming to the rescue of traumatised children, is the Child Protection Services Unit (CPSU), within ‘Appogg’ , now a household name.
The unit was set up with the aim of providing a service of specialised social work and related activities where there is suspicion or report of a child or young person (under the age of 18) being neglected, beaten or injured, emotionally or sexually abused. The service staffed by social workers, psychology officers and legal consultants, includes investigation of the abuse, assessment, counselling work with the children and their guardians, as well as co-operation with other public agencies and experts.
Since it’s inception in 1993, the CPSU has dealt with 9835 cases of child abuse to date. These statistics are just the tip of the iceberg, most abused and neglected children never come to the attention of government authorities. And yet alarmingly, ten years of limbo, down the line, the Children’s Act, protecting the rights of children, still hasn’t been given the green light. Nor is there a Sexual Offenders Act to ensure that perpetrators within the community are monitored by probation officers or that a Register, a possible preventative deterrent, listing the names of past offenders be kept available to the public.
Why are the authorities concerned dragging their feet on this one? How many recent political slogans were sold on something to the effect of ‘our children being our future’? Perversely loopholes in Maltese law seem to favour the perpetrator. No news here. The lack of legislation on domestic violence means that women and children are forced to flee the marital home, when their very lives are being threatened, often with nothing but the blouses on their backs whilst the perpetrator husband and father remains in possession of fort and finance. Foster parents are certainly no better off, vulnerable after years of caring, unfit parents may still claim their offspring back. Harsher sentences for child offenders can’t be meted out without a Sexual Offenders Act. Meanwhile, at the law courts, it’s a common occurrence for child abuse cases to be deferred on for up to five years and over. Despite the introduction of T.V. links in court which means that kids don’t need to physically face their aggressors in court, they are ‘re-disturbed’ each sitting often having to relive their abuse each time. “There needs to be more sensitivity regarding the expediency of these cases, so that children can get on with their lives” Ruth Sciberras says.
Most cases of child abuse are reported via the police, health and education sources, psychologists, other family agencies within Appogg, concerned relatives and neighbours or by means of ‘self-referral’ through Supportline 179. In the first six months of this year alone, Supportline received 11,098 calls reflecting local awareness, especially amongst children of the service. “Today children are coming forward and talking about their abuse, at an earlier stage much before it reaches critical levels” according to Ruth Sciberras
But what can be done to stem the abuse?. Education first and foremost. In addition to local parish parental skills programs, Appogg has a team of generic social workers who work on educating parents by grouping them according to IQ, mental health and
other demographics. They also have a community service centre in Bormla where the incidence of abuse is highest (followed by San Gwann, B’kara and then Valletta, Zabbar and Sliema.) In 1998 Appogg (then SWDP) conducted a campaign issuing leaflets to children and sticking up posters all round the Island informing kids and adults alike about the types of abuse and its effects, whilst promoting Supportline simultaneously. Sedqa have a ‘Babes’ programme which takes them to schools educating children about abuse prevention. “Nowadays there is a chain of support. Parents and schools talk about abuse, what is ok behaviour and what is not, much more openly than before. This is reinforced by all the awareness perpetuated by programmes on T.V and Radio” Ruth adds. According to Lisa “Social Work agencies have stepped in the shoes of the parent, If kids come to school with stories they investigate. The kid doesn’t feel they have to rat on their parents because the system is doing it for them, keeping an eye on them.”
Amy’s* story
The fact that Amy is at all alive is a miracle in itself. Today she is the caring mother of a nine year old daughter of her own. She considers herself a survivor, proud-though initially fearful- of having broken the generational chain of abuse. “I’m not making the same mistakes with my daughter, I’m patient with my child and I have never lain my hands on her.” At her daughter’s age, Amy was carted off to the Vincenzo Bugeja children’s institute in St. Venera while her mother was sentenced to one year in prison for theft. Amy’s earliest memories are of being sent out by her mother to steal merchandise and money from the ‘monti’, and shops in Valletta. Her tiny stature made it very easy for her to slip behind shop counters unnoticed. “You quickly learn how to become street wise, kif issir makkaka.”. When business was bad and Amy shakily returned home empty handed she could be sure a beating was in store. “My scalp is still full of scars and bumps, it’s embarrassing going to a hairdresser, my mum would throw tins of corned beef at my head and break broomsticks over my back, I always remember blood in the bath.” In addition to stealing, Amy was made to do all the housework, laundry and struggle with heavy shopping bags back home each morning. We’re talking about a seven year old here. Occasionally her father would intervene by giving Amy’s mother a throlloping, whenever he happened to catch her sending Amy out to steal. But his timely mediations were rare as he was never at home, “preferring to spend all his time at the local band club.” As with Lisa and Jenny, the abuse was only directed at herself not at her siblings.Almost as if each family needed an emotional scapegoat in order to absorb the sins of the father and to preserve the status quo of their parent’s marriage. Amy’s mother deposited her first brood of four kids with her own mother, leaving them and husband no.1, to co-habitate with Amy’s dad. When not being called “a monkey, ya Xadina, or stupid and good for nothing”, Amy’s mother would taunt her by telling her that her father, who never gave her any money, had often prostituted Amy’s mother. And that Amy might possibly be the offspring of one of her mother’s ‘clients’. To date Amy is still unsure of the verity of her mother’s claims, and can only vaguely remember being sexually abused by one of her mother’s ‘lovers’ though she has shut out the details from her memory. Despite the extreme physical and emotional abuse meted out by her mum, Amy still chooses to visit her and help her out with money, “but I can’t stay there long as I’m still very angry towards her.” Amy left the institute at 18 and went to live in the U.K. where she started experimenting with ‘ecstasy’, ‘trips’ and other drugs. Three years later she was admitted to Mount Carmel in Malta suffering from a severe breakdown and paranoid delusions brought upon by drug abuse. Now at 34 with the help of daily spiritual practices and a support group she is back on track. However she finds it difficult to keep to hold down a steady job and is mainly supported by the father of her child. Restless and needy, Amy attributes the problems in her relationships to her mum. “Inevitably I compare myself to her. I carry a lot of aggressiveness within me and I don’t trust.”
Lisa’s* Story
Today Lisa is 51 years old. Here, back in Malta, caring for her sick father she is facing the demons of her past. What originally was supposed to be a three month stay has evolved into a two year sojourn. Every day Lisa has to minister and nurse a man who physically and emotionally abused her up until the age of 17 when she left home.”My father wasn’t a family man. He wasn’t a happy person, he was emotionally disturbed himself. He wasn’t comfortable in the world and that reflected how he raised me. Instead of discipline or explaining what we had done wrong we just got backhanded.”
Despite Lisa’s giving up her home, country and life to care for a man she basically dislikes, the effort goes unappreciated. “He’s still critical, he doesn’t approve of anything I do, he’s not proud of me. If he sees me talking to a man for five minutes he calls me a whore and if there’s a chance to find fault with me, he’ll take it.” So why does Lisa put up with it? “because it’s surprising how much pain, fear, how much anger, how much of a bad situation you get used to tolerating (as a result of abuse) before enough becomes enough.”
Lisa considers herself both a survivor and a victim of abuse. A survivor because “I’m not an abuser, I have compassion for people, I’ve survived having a good heart. I now feel I have much better self-esteem. I wasn’t beaten because I was a bad person but because he (her father) was that way.” And a victim, to a certain extent because “abuse wears a groove in your personality. Without even knowing it when feelings come in, it’s very easy for them to follow that groove, like erosion. For example if I walk into a room and there’s a tense situation, I naturally adopt the feeling that it’s my fault.”
Whenever Lisa looks back on her childhood, there are no happy memories, all she can remember is the abuse.
“There was always the the hitting and the cruel critical comments. Real hard hitting and picking up and shaking as a child. Then when I started to grow, talk back and challenge my parents, the punching and beatings got worse”
Asking for help from relatives and family friends proved futile for Lisa. “My aunts and uncles saw nothing wrong in backhanding kids. Just that my father hit harder and more often. Lots of people were afraid of my dad. He was a rage-aholic.”
Lisa’s mother, who now suffers from Alzheimers, would back her father up. “She was disparaging, angry, yelled a lot and was hard to please. she was always on the edge because of him, we were all living in this pressure cooker of a house.”
Nowadays, Lisa feels sorry for her mum “She wanted him to love her so much that she was willing to put up with the way he was (unfaithful). She let a lot of things at home go by not to upset him.”
One of the most damaging and insecure aspects of abuse for a child is the lack of boundaries. The absence of logic between cause and effect. Physical abuse doesn’t come from what the child has done wrong, but what an adult who has maybe had a hard time at the office during the day, feels like punishing the child for. “It’s nothing like if you do something wrong, you know you will get hit because one time you may do the same thing and get hit and another time not. You don’t know what is going to trigger the outbursts or make your parents mad. So you always start to question how you think and what you’re doing. You start feeling unsure of everything and that you really must be a bad person. You take that mind set with you.”
To make matters worse there’s a lack of praise. Unfortunately we live in a society which doesn’t seem to place a lot of emphasis on rewarding good behaviour. Bad behaviour is put under the spotlight, and admonished but good behaviour, a grunt and it’s passed over. Good behaviour is expected out of kids not lauded and encouraged. You give a dog a treat when it doesn’t do its business on the carpet. As a nation we are very keen on rubbing our kid’s noses in their ‘failures’s but where are the treats? Most parents use the withdrawal of their love as a punishment. This is the worst penalty a child can pay to hear the words “I don’t love you.” As Jenny says “you only do your best because you are rewarded by it. You don’t do your best if your best is never any good.”
The repercussions of Lisa’s feelings of hopelessness inevitably spilled over into other areas of her life starting with school. Unable to concentrate on her studies “I was always so depressed and suicidal, continually wondering what was going to trigger another beating.” her state of mind was compounded by her immigrant status. “I had this survival mode. If I can live through this day” the consequences being that Lisa “never planned a fruitful future.” Her lack of belief in her mental capacities led her to drifting from one menial job to another, scraping together just enough money to run away from home and rent an apartment with a friend. “The abuse affected my self-esteem 110%. I was walking about with no spirit or wholeness” which wasn’t helped by her weight gain.
At 15, Lisa went on to develop an eating disorder (a condition she still suffers from today), gorging herself with food to try and satiate her emotional cravings for love and encouragement. In relationships the doors were open to abuse “I had a lot of sexual attractions with people, a lot of jealousy and possessiveness on my part. I made my body available. That is how I earned my boyfriends’ respect. I didn’t think I had enough to keep them interested with my own personality.” Then there was the drug use.
The healing commenced ‘with a lot and a lot of therapy’. Way back in high school, Lisa approached the school nurse/counsellor, confiding in her about her home situation. “She really brought me up from the ground, she made me aware that my parent’s behaviour wasn’t normal and that not everyone treated kids that way, most importantly that it wasn’t my fault.” The nurse tried to get Lisa’s parents to come to school and discuss the abuse but they didn’t bother seeing nothing wrong with the way they were bringing her up. After a particularly bad beating Lisa had also run to the police for help, but they returned her home not deeming it necessary to investigate what they regarded as a domestic fight between daughter and father.
Back at school Lisa began to attend a weekly therapy class, where students were given the possibility to talk about whatever was bothering them. There, through her classmate’s feedback she learnt that she “wasn’t this person my parents were making me out to be.”
Having been introduced to support, Lisa hasn’t looked back She started to “raise herself” out of her “black hole” with self-help groups, and one on one counselling. She attended OA (Overeating Anonymous) meetings for 15 years in California and continues therapy as a way of life.
Lisa recommends that kids talk about their abuse as much as possible, not letting it build up over years. “You need to get a clear idea how other people live. Then you start to realise that your family is different and not you.”
Jenny’s* story
Whenever Jenny goes to visit her parents nowadays, she is on guard. “I have to be strong, not to let them affect me, I’m tired of trying to make them understand me. I cannot include them in my life. They are just people to love and respect because they have a blood connection with me.” She observes her parents from a detached point of view, ever vigilant not to let them make her feel emotional. She sees history repeating itself in the way her parents treat her niece, their granddaughter. “She got an 85 in her maths exam. My father reacted to that grade by telling her that not even the most stupid person in the universe got less than 90.” Jenny’s eyes mist over as she recounts this episode.
Jenny’s earliest memories are of wetting her bed. She grew up without speaking at school or home, “feeling invisible” and apart from her peers. “I never put my hand up in class because of the fear and humiliation of whatever I said being wrong.”
Jenny grew up to the mantra of “you’re no good for anything”. Her parents would shout at her for wasting the money they were forking out on sending her to a private school. Her spelling problems were a result of her dyslexia. That was never looked into. She read her first book at 23 when after a traffic accident, leaving her with a lifelong impairment, her lawyer gave her a self-help book to while the time away in hospital.
At home, Jenny had to do all the chores in the house, polishing the floors, washing, dusting, in addition to her homework, “to pay my parent’s back for sending me to a private school.” Jenny wasn’t allowed to go to gymnastics which she was good at because Saturdays were for cleaning. “I felt like a slave at home.” One weekend after spotlessly scrubbing the house from top to bottom, Jenny dismantled a pen, hanging up its tip from the hallway ceiling eagerly awaiting her mum’s return and response. She had left the house giving Jenny stern instructions; “rrida pinna id-dar meta nigi lura” “I wanted her to come into the house and see her happy. If she could never say thank you, I wanted her to laugh at least. Something, I was desperate for a reaction.” Her mum ignored the pen.
Sundays had to be spent doing things mechanically as a family “to show the world what a perfect, amazing, functional family we were”. It is a fact that Jenny’s parents command a lot of respect in their local community and their advice on various matters is regularly sought out. “What neighbours say is very important for Maltese families but indoors when nobody is watching all the frustrations and anger come out.”
“In my parent’s eyes, up to this day they don’t believe they did anything wrong. No, in fact they had done their duty. They worked all their lives, put clothes on our back, fed us and gave us a good education. They think that’s all it takes.”
‘There was never any love or support given to me at home. I’m a kid, I’m not important. No touching, no cuddling, no warmth. They only gave me any attention at all when I did something wrong.” The abuse was only made worse by continuous comparisons to her elder brother. “I was always told my brother was better than I was. He always did what he was told. I rebelled. I was the baddie. If ever we had an argument, or my mother’s shouting got on my dad’s nerves, the belt always came out for me. Never him.”
Jenny describes her father as being “authoritarian, law abiding, inflexible and rigid.” Her father seized the key to Jenny’s room. Growing up she had no privacy, her parents would go through her things, read her diary, listen on the phone and follow her when she ventured outside. She grew up lying, covering up what she was doing because “they would never approve.” Jenny nails her diminutive size, not just down to genetics but to the emotional rejection and absence of communication in her childhood. “You don’t grow in size, you remain small. Your emotional, physical and natural growth is stunted, you don’t expand inside, you shrink and that is reflected in your outside being.”
“As a child I was terrified of my parents. I was completely scared to ask for anything. They were complete savages with me. I used to shake, have asthma attacks. I couldn’t breathe. I wasn’t allowed to grow up to become who I was. Rather I was always kept under what they thought was protection.” Jenny suffocated under their control, psychosomatically manifested in her breathing problems. She recalls always crying out of despair at being so withdrawn from the world.
Of course for the first boy that came along, Jenny was easy prey. “All along I had never experienced support, attention and caring. I thought sex was all these put together.” Between the ages of 12 to 21, Jenny didn’t view herself as being used. She equated sex with love.
Emotional bonding was fraught with fear. “As a kid every time I tried to bond, I got a beating, so I began to associate beating with bonding and later bondage.” Like Amy, Jenny feels that confusion in her sexual orientation has something to do with her upbringing; “I’m always seeking love from a female when all my sexual fantasies are about men.” The father figure I had was abusive, he hurt me the most physically, so I tend to find male sexual partners as over dominant for me.” “My mum is very strong, manipulative, a control freak, she always wins people to her way of thinking. I think I’m trying to replace the emptiness, the love my mother never gave me with the love of a woman. It’s confusing.”
The physical and emotional abuse stopped when Jenny left home at 21, with a two week holiday excuse to escape her parent’s clutches, extending her stay for another five years. “I felt I was a victim, I felt I had no choice to make my own decisions, wear my own clothes, until the day that I left home.” Abroad and away, Jenny found her voice. She also found heavy drugs and alcohol.
In the U.K., Jenny took a beginners psychology course to help her realise why her parents had behaved the way they did.
“What keeps me going is that I want to show my parents, I am not what they think I am, I’m not ignorant. I’m not a stupid person. I was always scared of becoming a drug junkie because that would prove them right.” Jenny never attempted suicide for similar reasons. “They would get all the support and me all the blame, it would have cemented the fact that I was abnormal and justified their actions.”
She blames her lack of confidence and need for approval on her upbringing. ”Basically my character is based on a lot of fears. When you have to work in all areas and aspects of your life, it takes a lifetime. However you can stay a victim or do something about it. There is a lot of help out there.”
Jenny an artist, compares her interior shell to a sculpture. “You’ve been moulded in a certain way and now you have to un-mould yourself. But you have to do this by yourself. You can’t get someone to do it for you.”
Happy childhood equals Happy adulthood. Reward your kids. The next time you find yourself in short shrift remember it’s going to stay with your kids for the rest of their lives.
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