The Impact of Trauma & Abuse

Recently I have become more aware of the horrors of the sex-trafficking of women and little girls. I am currently taking a training course that is not only educating me on this issue but is also teaching me how to be able to work with these girls.

One of my readings was so amazing. I realized that not only did it apply to victims of sex trafficking but to anyone who has been abused. Abuse is something that affects the entire person and it is something that so many people have had to overcome. I think it is important for people to understand what an abused person struggles with in order to make us more aware. After all, awareness if the first step in deciding to make a difference. And something needs to be done about the sex-trafficking issue and abuse in general.

This is an excerpt that I was required to read. It explains how trauma and abuse impacts the victim’s personhood. In this case, it deals specifically with young girls who are victim to sexual abuse (human sex trafficking) but I think it can be applied to any victim of  any kind of abuse!

Three aspects in us that is affected by sexual abuse and trauma:
• Voice
• Relationship
• Power

“We defined voice as that which articulates personhood. It is the person speaking himself or herself out into the world in truth. It explains the person to others in ways that can be heard and understood. We were not meant to live in silence. To live with chronic abuse is to live in silence, to be shut up. The voice of one so abused has been crushed. The victim is made inarticulate by intense fear. She is silenced by the deafness of others. . . She lives in a world where voices lie, distort, and deceive. So she lies to
herself and distorts the truth of her life in order to survive.”

“Ongoing sexual abuse requires the child to live alone. She is isolated because she cannot ‘tell.’ She is alone because no one comes to comfort. She is forsaken by those who were meant to sustain. She is not known in truth, for the fact that she is a little girl being abused is rejected and denied. She is not loved; to love is to protect and preserve, but she is being harmed and destroyed. Though the pretense of relationship may exist for the outside world, it is just that—a pretense. . . The chronically abused child not only lacks a ‘secure base’ but also faces in that base a climate of pervasive terror and danger. Relationship has become a house of horrors.”

“When a child lives with unpredictable, terrifying, and relentless abuse, she experiences herself as perpetually powerless. Such phrases as ‘ it doesn’t matter’ and ‘forget it’ are frequent comments among survivors and are usually said with a shrug of the shoulders. They have learned that what matters to them does not matter to others. Who they truly were was invisible in the home, for no response was given to the abuse. Every effort they made to stop the abuse was ineffective. No matter what they did or said, it came again and again. They perceive themselves either has having no impact on the people around them or as extremely powerful in a lethal way; they define themselves—or have had others define them—as the source of evil that was done. Power, like voice and relationship, has been destroyed, marred beyond recognition.”

– Diane Langberg

Tags: abuse, awareness, child, girls, power, relationship, Sex-trafficking, trafficking, training, trauma, voice, women