Invisible Girls

by Patti Feuereisen

  Girls and women from all over the world write to say thank you, to say they’d never had the courage to speak about their abuse out loud until they read the book. They write to say I’m “healing.” I can’t imagine work more rewarding than this. These readers are creating a strong community of healing and strength, and resolution.

  Every day invisible girls are finding their way to the book and to their own healing and wholeness. In this edition, we want you to hear their voices. In Chapter 17, “Five Years of E-mails and Letters from Around the World: Girls Become More and More Visible Every Day,” you will hear directly from girls and women who contacted me after reading the book. They want you to hear their responses and their stories of healing and how they were changed by reading Invisible Girls.

  It also became clear to me through my recent work that we needed to add the voices of girls “in the life.” Sex trafficking, prostitution, and pornography are forms of sexual abuse, and the voices of these girls and young women are so strong and clear. Chapter 12, “Stop Calling Us Whores: Prostitution Is Sexual Abuse,” addresses the issues involved in these forms of abuse, especially in light of the ways violence against girls and women has become so much more tolerated and normalized through popular culture. I have the honor of working with girls from GEMS (Girls Educational and Mentoring Services), an organization committed to helping young women ages twelve through twenty-one get out of the commercial sex industry, and in the chapter, you will hear their amazing voices. Girls who have been prostituted feel the same as the invisible girls who have been molested by their fathers, uncles, or brothers. They shared their experiences on a retreat I sponsored through Girlthrive, my nonprofit where girls from upper-middle-class suburbs bonded with girls from marginal urban areas who were prostituted.

  Through our index, you can more easily return to particular issues and stories, as well as a few organizations for boys and men to step up and join the fight to end violence against girls and women. When I ask myself what has changed in the world, in the law, in public policy and awareness since the first and second editions were published, the answer is, not enough. But we are fighting the fight and healing is happening with girls and women. The teen girls and young women who reach out to me through Invisible Girls and my organization Girlthrive, and all our readers, are living proof that this strength and healing is happening in spite of the misogynistic culture against girls and women.

  When we first published Invisible Girls, my hope was not only to get girls on their paths to healing but also to participate in some meaningful way in the global movement to stop the abuse of young girls and women. I intended to do my part in changing the culture around sexual abuse and violence against women, by sharing the voices of my brilliant clients and giving guidance throughout. And we have certainly succeeded by giving girls back their hearts and souls. With every girl who finds her voice and stops her abuse or the risk of ever being abused again, we helped her to open up and to love and to trust, and most of all to know she is worthy. My mission was, and is, to reach sexually abused girls directly with the simple message that the abuse they suffered was not their fault and that the very best thing they can do for their healing is to begin to open up about it. And to keep opening up and talking.

  Girls are getting the message. They are speaking out, finding their way out of abusive homes, and reclaiming their bodies and moving into healthy, adult relationships. This special book has done what I dreamed it could, and it has been an unbelievably rewarding journey so far.

  With this new edition and this new time where conversations about sexual assault and abuse seem possible, we hope to spread our wings even further. As one teen girl from London told me in a recent e-mail:

  I read your book and it made me see that I’m not alone, but surrounded by love and compassion. If it wasn’t for your book I probably would not be here today doing what I am now. I just wanted to say thank you for writing such a beautiful book. I will never forget the wonderful things it showed me, how to heal and recover from a traumatic event. God bless all the wonderful girls—God bless us all—we are now filled with love and hope. We will never be invisible again!

  With love and thanks from the

  other side of the pond,

  Evelyn

  WELCOME, READERS

  Thank you for picking up this book. One out of four girls in the United States will be abused by the time she is sixteen. This book is for all of you. Please know that whoever you are, you are not alone!

  If you are a survivor, I want to offer you a special welcome. Whether you are already hard at work healing from the trauma of abuse or are just admitting for the first time—perhaps even to yourself—that you were abused, I hope you will find this book an important step in your healing process.

  This book is filled with survivors’ stories, and they may trigger some intense feelings and painful memories for you. Please know that the message woven throughout is that there is deep healing after sexual abuse. Please feel free to skip around and take the book in the doses you can handle. But I will let you know that I was very careful to go slowly and break it down into sections, similar to the ways that girls disclose their sexual abuse. I want you to always feel safe and supported as you are reading. You might want to keep a journal to record your thoughts, feelings, and memories. If you’re not currently in counseling, I hope you will find someone you can trust to share the feelings that come up for you as you read.

  If you don’t have someone you can talk with, or cannot find your own community, please know that you can always call RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and Incest Network), the national hotline for rape and incest survivors, at (800) 656-HOPE (800-656-4673), or you can write to me personally at our website, www

  .invisiblegirlsthrive.com, which can serve as a companion to the book and an Internet community of girls and young women.

  Invisible Girls opens up sexual abuse to the community and to the culture at large. It offers a porthole into the worlds of teenage girls and young women who are abuse survivors. You have never heard the voices of young survivors in quite this way before, where secret worlds and inner coping mechanisms are revealed. To clinicians and medical professionals, parents, high school and university guidance departments, students of psychology, personnel at rape crisis centers and at adolescent and young adult psychiatric units, high school and college psychology classes, partners of survivors, and relatives of abusers: Invisible Girls will lead you to new answers and a deeper understanding of sexual abuse, and it will help you to transform the culture of shame and secrecy that surrounds abuse.

  In my thirty years of working with sexual-abuse survivors, I have never stopped being amazed by the ingenuity and brilliance of girls, by their ability to thrive even through horrible experiences. I learn so much from them. I learn how they’ve coped, how they’ve found comfort in the world, how they’ve moved on in their lives and found good, healthy love. These girls are my teachers, and now some of them have come forward to share their journeys with all of you.

  The stories, quotes, questions, and poetry included in this book were contributed by some of the hundreds of girls I have worked with over the years. These are girls I know personally. I have worked with some of them for years and followed their success in life. I want you to know them, too, and to grow and learn from their strength, resilience, and experiences. They are all grateful for the opportunity to reach out to you. To ensure their privacy and safety, however, I asked them to choose pseudonyms. With perfect synchronicity, some girls asked whether they could be called by gem names, others flowers, and I realized how perfect that was—that they would be seen in all their brilliance and beauty and radiance: Zinnia, Lily, Coral, Garnet, Topaz, Sage, Ivy, Amber, Jasmine, Iris, Dahlia, Pearl, and Ruby Rose.

  In my eyes, each and every one of these girls—and every other sexually abused girl who finds her voice, finds someone to whom she can tell her story—is a heroine. Whether or not you are a survivor, we invite you to join these extraordinary girls in
their movement to end the silence, to release the shame and guilt and fear, and to begin the healing of the collective spirit of girls everywhere.

  PART ONE

  WHAT IS IN PANDORA’S BOX? SEXUAL ABUSE AND HOW IT AFFECTS US

  CHAPTER 1

  WHO WE ARE AND HOW WE GOT HERE

  The Birth of Our Book

  When I was twelve years old my father explained that I was a beautiful young girl and that he had to have me because he was a hungry man. He said that one could not put a plate of spaghetti in front of a hungry man and expect him not to eat it.

  —a twenty-two-year-old incest survivor

  Incest and all sexual abuse knows no color, class, or nationality. Survivors are of European American, African American, Latin American descent. They are Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian. They identify as gay, bisexual, straight, queer, and transsexual. There is only diversity within the experience of sexual abuse, no division of wealth, color, religion, entitlement, or poverty. These teen girls are our neighbors, our classmates, our friends. They are from single-family homes, they are only children, they have six siblings, they struggle in school, they excel in school, they are artists, scholars, athletes, boxers, musicians. They come from upper-, middle-, and working-class backgrounds. These girls are any girl. When you meet these girls, you have no idea they are sexual-abuse survivors. Like you, they are typical girls—girls on the soccer team, the debate team, in the drama club; highly functioning and high-achieving; or academically challenged but striving to do well. These girls are at top prep schools, top public high schools, or struggling urban public high schools; these girls live in rural areas, in urban communities, in marginal communities. These girls are destined for top colleges, the military, or supporting their families, and they are young women already in college and those starting careers. Girls you’d “never think” had been, or were being, abused. I call them invisible girls because they defy any imagined stereotypes. And the fact is, no one can tell from the outside whether you have experienced sexual abuse. There is no stereotype.

  Throughout this book, you will hear directly from teen girls and young women who have endured sexual abuse. They will tell their stories of father-daughter, brother-sister, cousin incest; date rape, acquaintance rape, and mentor abuse; and prostitution. All too often, as you’ll see, they wonder, “Why me?” or “Why didn’t I stop him?” Even today, with all the disclosure of sexual abuse, there is still so much cultural denial, so much personal guilt and shame surrounding the subject of abuse that girls still often feel it is their fault.

  When you live in the same house as a predator your sixth sense is alive and kicking at all times. You know he is going to do something that night, even before he considers what is at stake. The fight is only on the surface, a delicate exchange of looks, of using the other bodies around to try and plan your escape. It’s futile and you know it. In the Disney story, Bambi had a chance. The chance of running as fast as he could in the open field. That doesn’t mean he will make it, but he can run. I didn’t know I could, because no one had shown me how to. It would take me a while to learn—after all the harm was done.

  —a twenty-two-year-old incest survivor

  BOYS WILL BE BOYS

  Why didn’t you stop him? This is a question that the culture has promoted, “Hey, you should have just stopped him—isn’t it your fault?” And it is a question survivors of sexual abuse ask themselves all the time. But there are very good reasons why you didn’t stop him. You didn’t stop him because you lived under “his” roof, because you depended on him financially, because your abuser wove a web of fear and entrapment around you, because you were confused, because you were young and didn’t have good options or a strong support system in place. Or you just moved away from home for the first time, you were insecure, and vulnerable. You were not brought up in a home with good boundaries. You did not believe it was possible, and many times, especially in the case of incest, it is not, until you are out of your home. This book will help you work through these feelings of entrapment and fear to see that sexual abuse is never your fault and that you did nothing to cause your own abuse.

  Why didn’t you stop him? You didn’t stop him because we live in a culture where “boys will be boys”—a culture that, through its fairy tales, movies, and advertising, persistently pushes the sexist belief that young girls are ready for sex when their bodies first develop; a culture that insinuates that these girls “really want” the older men who abuse them; a culture that still questions the survivor’s role in the crime, whether it be a young girl raped by her uncle (“Was she being flirtatious?”) or a guy who rapes his date (“Was she leading him on? What was she wearing?”).

  We live in a culture where a male-dominated government decides the laws about rape and incest, pornography, child and spousal abuse, and abortion—laws that directly impact women’s health and happiness. Simply put, we live in a culture that does not honor women and children; where sexuality, especially female sexuality, is a commodity, something that is used to sell products or satisfy male desires; where women, and especially women of color, are depicted on music videos as little more than prostitutes.

  In this culture, men still sexually abuse girls at staggering rates. And now with #MeToo the culture is forced to hear this reality with all the girls and women coming forward sharing their stories of sexual abuse publicly, reclaiming their voices.

  THE HISTORICAL COVER-UP

  The shameful fact is that forced sexual contact without consent—from inappropriate touching to sodomy to rape—has been with us throughout history, and it wasn’t even widely acknowledged as a crime in the United States until women in the 1970s began to speak out. As far back as the late nineteenth century, the father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud, made efforts to publicize the trauma of incest. He had become increasingly disturbed as patient after patient—affluent women from conventional families—described sexual abuse at the hands of their fathers, uncles, family friends, or male relatives. At first he took these women at their word and rushed to present his startling findings to his colleagues (some of whom, it is now known, were molesting their own patients and nieces). He was roundly ridiculed and harshly rebuked in the professional community. To redeem himself, he “rethought” the whole issue and decided that these women had only fantasized about the abuse—that their accounts were nothing more than an elaborate wish to be forcibly taken by their fathers, uncles, even their therapists! This is what has come to be known as Freud’s “seduction theory,” and it set a precedent for disbelieving survivors of sexual abuse for the next hundred years.

  THE FEMINIST UNCOVERING

  Yet, in the 1970s, women started speaking out about their incest and abuse experiences, and feminist clinicians followed. Freud’s theories were challenged and criticized within the medical field. And with the work of pioneering scholars like Judith Lewis Herman and Diana Russell, as well as the publication of Sandra Butler’s Conspiracy of Silence and Louise Armstrong’s personal memoir of incest, Kiss Daddy Goodnight, the silence and disbelief around incest and abuse slowly broke open. But it wasn’t until the publication of Ellen Bass and Laura Davis’s The Courage to Heal in 1988 that the issue really took the spotlight. In this book, dozens of women spoke about the ongoing trauma of the sexual abuse they had experienced as children. The book gave women permission to believe in themselves in a most profound way. But, invaluable as all these books were and are, all of them told the story of abuse from an adult’s perspective. Now there are more books written about sexual abuse but still most speak from an adult’s perspective, while teen girls and young women in their twenties remain the most vulnerable to sexual abuse.

  Beginning in the 1990s, adolescent girls started writing their own books. They wrote about love, life, family, sex, drugs, depression, and eating disorders, beginning with Sara Shandler’s Ophelia Speaks. Then girls who had been sexually abused started publishing zines and writing songs about it. In the early 2000s websites started po
pping up, including Pandora’s Project, with stories of sexual abuse. My website, Girlthrive, has more than fifty personal stories of girls writing to me to share their experiences and get advice. Now, with the popularity of social media—Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat—teen girls and young women began to reveal their stories publicly. The blog project Unbreakable created by college freshman Grace Brown in 2011 showed survivors holding signs with quotes of what their abusers told them. They were proving they were unbreakable. The #MeToo movement began in 2006, yet it was only in 2017, in response to the ways in which our misogynistic culture has been exposed across politics and many high-profile industries, that the movement brought thousands of faces and voices to the Internet sharing their sexual-abuse experiences. In 2017 US gymnasts broke open the largest sex-abuse case in history to reach the courts against their serial abuser.

  All this uncovering and reclaiming voices is wonderful, exciting, and necessary. Healing after the disclosure is vital. Through the voices in our book, we hear their stories not only of sexual abuse but also of resilience, in their own words with the kind of internal detail that touches every core of their souls. We also are taken into the worlds of each girl’s road to recovery and the inner life of the struggle and the strength. We hear the resolution. Invisible Girls takes you to the next step, the step of understanding, relating, and not only reclaiming your voice but literally having the tools to begin to heal in a deep way.