In this personal testimony, Epic staff TJ Poon (serving in Texas) shares about the effects of abuse, the environments that allow it to happen, and the courage required to voice our pain. Inspired by events surrounding the 2011 Penn State scandal, this resource can help you to enter into others’ stories and struggles with honesty and compassion.
Up until recently, I almost purposefully avoided news and breaking scandals centered around sexual abuse. The nightmare of abuse is one that I know from personal experience, and though I have pursued and obtained much healing, powerful waves of emotion can still easily overtake me. It is a feeling that I deal with as it comes, but not one I often go looking for.
There is so much to be sad, angry and sickened over. Whether it is a coach, family member, clergyman, or a stranger, the effects of sexual abuse are immediate and catastrophic to the victim’s soul. There is no human 
punishment befitting of the one who commits such an awful crime against the body, soul and spirit of another. I am in sadness when I hear horrific details emerging from national cases, and more than a little angry when I think about the silence of those who witnessed some of the abuses, but said nothing.
If you are not familiar with the pervasiveness of sexual abuse, the statistics are horrifying: 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys will be abused before the age of 18. Those numbers are nauseating, and probably low. Dan Allender says here, “I know that everyone in America is relating directly and intimately with at least one person who has been sexually abused. And… we don’t talk about it.” Once confronted with the reality of the proportion of the population who has been abused, the silence of our culture is deafening. If you haven’t already clicked through to the Allender post, please read it for his thoughts on this phenomenon.
What has been weighing especially heavily on my heart and what I keep coming back to that usually receives little-to-no airtime, is the home of the abused child. If the numbers above frighten you as much as me, these are equally troubling: the vast majority of survivors are abused by someone they know. (94% in one study.) The implications are enormous.
Certainly, there are many cases of sexual abuse that are “random” acts of evil and not in any way brought on by a caretaker’s negligence. But often, a predator looks for a person whose soul is not nourished at home, leaving them vulnerable and unprotected to the perpetrator, and without a safe place to turn to after the damage has occurred. You can imagine the psyche of a child who undergoes consistent, lasting torment at the hands of another and doesn’t say anything: before the attack occurred, that child’s voice had already been lost.
There is nothing more unsettling for a child than the feeling of powerlessness that comes with the knowledge that those who are put on this Earth to protect them have either contributed to their abuse, turned a blind eye when they saw it, or given them no place to turn when they were violated. Facing the reality that those who are supposed to protect us have abdicated their role and left us to the wolves is profoundly damaging. In fact, it is more than some can bear. I have heard women talk about their families, how wonderful, loving and supportive they are, yet also admit that they have never spoken of their sexual abuse to their parents. There is a major cognitive “miss” here. The betrayal of the family is not acknowledged.
I am not just talking about a parent who sees abuse occurring and refuses to intervene. That indeed happens, but betrayal can come in a number of other ways, many insidious, that render the family incapable of providing the protection that God intended. Picture a child whose father tells him to “quit moping” when his countenance is fallen, because the family system doesn’t allow for pain to be experienced or acknowledged. The father is too uninvolved and selfish to look into the source of his child’s agony. Or a mother who is unstable and needy. Her ability to function depends on the apparent harmony and relative functioning of the family. Obviously, these are not places where a child can legitimately turn for protection, yet “abuse victims rarely admit the near ‘impossibility’ of securing help from their family of origin; rather they blame themselves for not seeking help.”¹
When I first began to face my abuse and name it, this is where most of my reflection occurred, and it became the source of my most profound pain. It was as if the scales fell off of my eyes, and I began to face for the first time 
that my family was not a place of safety, that my parents were committed to many things more deeply than my protection, and that the dynamics there had actually “set me up” to be abused. I need to be clear here in that absolutely no fault can be removed from the adult who initiated a physical, sexual relationship with me. The responsibility of his actions belongs to him alone. I am not removing the blame from the abuser-proper. Rather, the unsafe family is a fertile breeding ground where the evil of sexual abuse can grow more easily and often unchecked.
If the numbers of children who have been abused is on the rise, and if the vast majority of those abuses are from a family member, friend or acquaintance (in other words, not a stranger), then it seems we are losing the family as a place of safety. We are losing parents who really parent, and therefore we are losing childhood, and children. I have no solutions, but I do know that fighting this darkness requires that we move toward it, rather than cowering in fear, discouragement or denial.
We must begin to name our abuse and that of our friends, spouses and children. In that naming we will begin to give a voice to those who have been silenced; we will refuse to further victimize ourselves and others through denial; we will enter the story that up to a quarter of Americans are living.
Having the courage to enter the story is where healing begins.
¹Taken from The Wounded Heart, by Dan Allender
Discussion Questions:
- What are some reasons that keep us from entering into the painful parts of our own stories, or the stories of others?
- Have you ever heard sexual abuse talked about in the church or from the pulpit? Why do you think it’s so uncommon?
- What are some benefits in acknowledging our pain? Why do you think God calls us to enter into others’ stories?
- What are some ways that we can come alongside those who have experienced abuse in our ministries and fellowships?