Chapter 1. Doleful Chamber (B)…
Doleful Chamber
It was a piss-poor excuse of a barn, not the red, picturesque kind, more of a typeless, door-less, unpainted lean-to with one side open for vehicle access. It had a loft for hay at one end, which technically makes it a barn.
This barn sat across a country road from the small farm my family bought when I was five. It was a few miles outside Merde Vista, a town of maybe a thousand people. We lived across the two-lane blacktop road from the family that owned the barn. Our farm had more than a dozen acres and a couple of piss-poor buildings much like the barn across the road. All told, it was barely enough for the seven cows and two horses my parents bought. He made a living as a skilled tradesman. I don't think he made any money from the cattle or the horses. In hindsight, this farm was a lifestyle choice my parents made. They had both grown up on farms and I suppose this made their hearts warmer. I don't know much about the family across the road, who lived in a smaller, darker house on a farm of similar size. I think they made a living from their land. If they did, it wasn't much of a living.
When you live in out in the sticks, your playmates are few in number and range in age from five to 15 or so. In a rural neighborhood, there's very little choice of who your playmates will be. For the twisted young man across the road, that was an ideal arrangement.
I have very little memory of our relationship with the neighbors. I do know that I and my siblings passed the time with the kids from around the three or four other houses in the area, including the five kids across the road. I have even fewer memories of Chester
who was about 14 at the time. I remember being across the road on a couple occasions and playing in that barn at least once. I don't remember if that was the same day as the rape or not.
My description of the primary trauma, being raped, is based on memories that range from vivid to vague. I fill in some gaps with logical deductions of what must have happened given other events, and some extrapolations about what may have happened based on triggers that have affected me throughout my life.
I must have been over there to play with one or more of those kids one day. Somehow, Chester managed to isolate me from other kids and any adults that might have been around.
Trigger Warning/ Chester either tricked or compelled me to help him look for something in the loft of that barn. I remember ascending the ladder leading up to the loft. He must have also tricked or compelled me to take down my pants, bend over a hay bale, let him get behind me, and anally rape me. Chester must have explained this away as some form of searching technique. I have vague memories of the hay bales. I also a more than vague memory of looking behind me, seeing the small silhouette of another kid's head poking over the floor of the loft (while standing on the ladder) and Chester shouting something to the effect of get out of here. I have always assumed that the other kid was Chester's youngest sister, younger than I. Since then, I have wondered to myself if it was possibly my brother, but I doubt it. Small head, little kid.
When he finished--and both the sight and sound of this is vivid in my memory--Chester reached his left hand around me so that I could see the semen on his thumb and said: "see, this is what I was looking for right here."
I have no memory of going home that day. I have this somewhat foggy memory of pulling down my underwear in front of my mother and showing her the blood stain. I suspect I may have said something to her about being hurt. Decades later, I wrote in my journal that I may have mentioned something about a shovel handle. Perhaps my six year old self thought that his penis was a shovel handle. /Safe to Read.
I have a gut feeling that my mother shut down on seeing this and didn't want to know more. Her normal pattern would have been to ask, exclaim, and wonder aloud, but that normal pattern seems loudly absent.
Somehow I knew that writing might bring out more memories, those that hang just slightly over the edge of consciousness. Was she stunned? Did my mother put two and two (meaning my playing with the kids across the road and blood in my underwear) together and freeze up? Is it possible that I mentioned that I helped Chester look for something? Is it possible that I told her we were alone together in the barn? Did I mention pain? These questions I can't answer, at least not now. I have a feeling though, and this is the source of what I call the secondary trauma, that my mom did at least subconsciously draw the conclusion but buried the thought as quickly as it emerged.
I also have a reliable though not vivid memory of Chester looking back at me while we rode the school bus. The bus hauled all the kids from 1st grade through high school along our road to and from school. That means I had to cross to Chester's side of the road, wait for the bus, and ride it with him every school day both to and from school.
For the next three years until we moved to another town I was so terrified at school that I often wet my pants. I wasn't privy to what my parents said to each other about it, or what interactions they had with my teachers. I do remember my 1st grade teacher encouraging me to use the restroom in the back of the class. I suppose she thought I had some issue with using the restroom down the hall. Nope, that wasn't the problem. The problem was that something deep inside was trying to send an urgent, encoded plea for help to anyone that might be paying attention. No one was paying attention. My teachers eventually gave up assuming I would just grow out of it. I did grow out of the pants-wetting, but only after we left that town and put many miles between Chester and me.
Before that move, between the ages of six and nine, I was often teased because my lips were a shade or two redder than other boys. They asked me if I was a girl or if I was wearing lipstick. The memory of this sits heavy on my mind, as if there's a lot more to it than just kids teasing. I firmly believe, though I have no direct memory, that it caught the attention of perverted older boys, Chester for one but also another. One day I was waiting in the hall outside my older brother's classroom when one of his classmates, Rick, walked up to me and said something flirtatious while he stroked my throat and chin using an upward motion of his index and middle fingers. It was the kind of demeaning gesture creepy men often make to women. I remember what he looked like and that I froze up, but nothing else.
Years after I had recovered these memories and during the time when I was seeing a psychologist, I realized something about Chester: I probably wasn't his first or his last victim. Intuitively I know this, though I can't prove it. It has to do with how well he planned his abuse. He knew just what to say to lure a child to a secluded spot. And he enjoyed what he did, especially the part when he revealed the ruse and showed me what he had been looking for. It was his way telling me how gullible I was, if not stupid, less powerful, defeated, and beneath him both literally and figuratively. He also knew how to keep a victim quiet, very quiet. Such skills don’t just happen, they are learned. An open question I've had over the years is where he learned this. Researchers that study such things will tell you that it’s often in the home.
There are several levels of causation for child sexual abuse. These range from genetic dispositions to culture, environment, and upbringing. Each layer provides its own complexities. On the one hand, we have a strong emotional desire to lump it all together as a pure form of evil and deal with it by letting the anger and rage flow freely. On the other hand, to truly stop it from happening and to help ourselves heal from its effects, we need to set emotion aside and start splitting hairs.
With that in mind, its possible that some of the following material may be triggering:
Children with sexual behavior issues tend to come from dysfunctional families, including but not limited to:
- Witnessing violence between parents.
Arrest of one or more parents.
Poor relationship between parents and children.
- Sexual abuse and its denial within the extended family.
- Physical abuse of children.
- Poverty.
- Special educational services.
- Behavioral measurements rated at clinical level.
These children exhibit learning and psychiatric disorders that are commonly associated with mistreatment. These families are also very poor at providing an environment where recovery can take place (Finkelhor 1991; Gray 1997 and 1999; Wieckowski 1998).
Statistical data indicates that the number of male pedophiles that were abused when they were children ranges from 28 to 93%. The estimates are higher for female pedophiles, 47 to 100% (Hall and Hall 2007). The data is similar for incest; those that were abused as children had a higher risk of committing incest themselves (Erickson 2006). Children that weren’t related by blood to their caregivers, orphans and children of step-parents, put them at higher risk for sexual abuse (Korbin 1997).
When children grow up in such dysfunctional environments, their development may suffer to such an extent that they are at greater risk of becoming abusive themselves. It could be because these children never develop empathy, which develops in children very early up to about age 3. A basic level of empathy is a foundation for further development of reciprocity, a sense of fairness, and the ability to care for others [ expand and provide citations.] Without empathy, people don’t feel anything when they see others suffering.
Child sexual abusers have a strong tendency to feel inferior, are lonely, have low self-esteem, have a need to for domination, and are emotionally immature. They tend to have difficulty with age-appropriate interpersonal relations due to being passive-aggressive. They use defense mechanisms including denial, manipulation of fact, and rationalization. Abusers also commonly have a major psychiatric disorder. They typically lack remorse and don’t care about the harm they cause (Hall and Hall 2007; Finkelhor 1991). Male child sex abusers are narcissistic and more likely to be sexually aggressive, have less empathy for victims of rape, and believe in rape myths that shift blame to the victim. In short, while psychopaths do commit rape, psychopathology is not a strong predictor of it (Thompson 2009).
That child sex abusers are sick may help explain but it doesn’t excuse their behavior. As much as 85% of sexual offenses against children are premeditated. Rather than being unplanned without thought of consequences, such acts are more likely the result of compulsions that are planned to relieve urges (Hall and Hall 2007). These people often get themselves into jobs or positions (priests, teachers, coaches, and the like) where they have access to a large pool of potential victims. Like Chester, they sometimes spend a great deal of time grooming their victims, building high levels of trust with both the victim and her or his parents, before taking action [citation??]. That fact alone speaks loudly that those that sexually abuse children are masters of deception.
While this tells us about the abusers and what environments they come from, that’s only part of the story. There are other powerful forces at work that create such environments. We’ll go into later.
I have no evidence for this, just a gut feeling, but I believe that was the case in Chester's home. Just a year or two ago my mother told me that Chester's brothers and Chester himself were "very hard" on the boys from another family that lived down the road. I assume she meant physically very hard, but how would she know one way or another? My guess is that it was more than just physical. And if it's true that he learned it in the home, what were the odds that the lot of them, four brothers in all, learned it too? There can only be one answer to that.
