Download the thesis - South Eastern Centre Against Sexual Assault

isolating effects.
Feelings of powerlessness, learned helplessness, impaired self-efficacy, a learned
inability to cope and passivity are among the consequences of being overpowered by
others during childhood; alternatively, victims may demonstrate an overeagerness to
please (Briere, Walker 14). John Briere notes that this early negative experience,
especially because it predominantly occurs within the bounds of a close relationship,
leads to the avoidance of challenging tasks, ambivalence, fear and vulnerability,
procrastination and underachievement in both social and work life (24-26), traits that
were evident in project participants. Gold describes how victims who are led to believe
they are responsible for their abuse due to a character flaw continue to bear the scars
for years (49). They are known to accept their character as others have defined it,
and are unable to shake off this negative mantle even in the face of evidence to the
contrary. This was evidenced by participants’ frequent self-references to being
faceless, ugly or stupid.
Victims and psychologists working in the fields of trauma and sexual abuse attest to
the difficulties of verbalising the experience of trauma, commonly referring to trauma
as being “unspeakable”, a term that is both a reality and a metaphor for the
experience. The traumatic experience is, according to Belau, tied to a system of
representation; to language. This is partly due to the nature of how and where in the
brain the trauma memory is laid down. Bessel A van der Kolk (1994, 1996) and
Babette Rothschild describe traumatic memories being stored differently from other
experiences regardless of how momentous those other experiences might be, and this
helps explain why accessing the traumatic memory verbally can be extremely difficult.
In addition to the issues surrounding the creation and storing of trauma memories,
psychiatrist and Holocaust child survivor Paul Valent reveals another impediment to
memory: when trauma occurs in children before they are capable of speech, there is
no verbal language available to express it. The absence of verbal language extends to
include others, such as older children, who may lack an appropriate vocabulary to
express the complexities of the experience. Roberta Culbertson writes of her memory
of childhood sexual abuse as being both a “known and felt truth” but fragmented and
illogical, and that as such the memory and complete truth seem “unreachable” (170).
32