Invisible Girls

by Patti Feuereisen

  Until around nine or ten years of age, many girls are still supportive of one another. They still communicate openly with each other about their feelings and struggles. They still trust their gut instincts. They go for the ball in soccer with a vengeance; they smack the tennis ball and don’t worry if their skirt flies up. They know whom they like and whom they dislike and are not afraid to go after things they want.

  But as their bodies start to develop, things change. As their breasts grow, it becomes more and more difficult to run fast. It’s more challenging to swim when they have their period. It becomes harder for them to choose what they “want.” Gender roles, hormonal changes, and cultural expectations all collide as girls try to figure out how to fit in. Because of the male-dominated culture they live in, they begin to distrust their instincts; they begin to doubt themselves and give a lot of weight to what their peer group thinks.

  Girls look to their friends for guidance and social footing. At the same time, adolescent girls may start to feel intense competition with one another as they jockey for social position, and they can become downright cruel as they compete in a male-dominated culture. There is confusion and deep waves of emotion. Sometimes friendships with other girls are their lifeline, and yet sometimes that lifeline gets lost. That kind of competitiveness just doesn’t happen among younger girls. It can begin during a girl’s teen years.

  It’s hard being an adolescent girl. And add any other stresses—divorcing parents, the death of a close friend or relative, moving and starting a new school, breaking out with acne—and you can end up feeling very helpless and alone, and much more vulnerable to social pressures.

  Adolescent girls are desperate to fit in, but they also realize that there’s more at stake than ever. Because of social pressure to act and look a particular way (i.e., demure and sexy), many girls find it more difficult to speak their minds. Depending on their cultural background and peer group, they may start to edit themselves in an effort to fit in.

  In her research, psychologist Lyn Mikel Brown found that girls like some of you, girls from middle-class and affluent homes, have a much more difficult time expressing their anger than girls of lower income and less privilege. These girls are raised to be good, compliant, and successful. Some girls have to overcome many years of conditioning to find their power and their voices. When girls and young women embrace feminism, they find support from each other in all aspects of their lives. But even so it can be complicated for girls to find their power along with all the insecurities that accompany being an adolescent girl. With increased social media exposure, things can go both ways for girls. There are more young feminist groups forming online, but there is also an uptick in online bullying and also sexualizing girls by posting photos without their permission. As of 2018, although the laws vary from state to state, “sexting” photos is a crime, and promoting sexually explicit photos of a minor can actually result in jail time—a teenager who takes a naked picture of herself and sends it to another teen has committed a crime with legal consequences. So you really need to be mindful of being pressured—even by your boyfriend—to send any photos that are sexual. Make sure you protect yourself because you could be the one in legal trouble!

  With all this going on, it’s also around this time that girls start to require greater independence from their parents. They’ll start to push their parents away, even though they still need them—sometimes desperately. That push-pull is all part of the transition from girlhood to womanhood, from childhood to adulthood.

  Adolescent girls begin to suffer, often acutely if not consciously, from the effects of sexism and male domination, all of which may have seemed irrelevant when they were younger. They can sense that their options in the world are shrinking. People are now more interested in how they look and how they interact socially than in their achievements. They know that they are being increasingly defined by their sex appeal, even if they don’t feel sexy at all and often don’t know how to handle all the sexual attention.

  Consider how all females are socialized to take on blame and responsibility for everything that happens at the interpersonal level. Girls who have been molested are no different. You often feel tremendous guilt and shame; you often feel it’s somehow your fault. Let us say it again: It never is.

  And our culture is pushing girls earlier and earlier to be “sexy.” This is reinforced constantly by music videos in a male-dominated industry, which has an impact on boys’ attitudes and role in reinforcing the sexualizing of girls. Music videos sexualize girls at younger and younger ages.

  Let’s begin in the late ’90s with Britney Spears: in one of her videos, “Baby One More Time,” Britney was made up to look like a young schoolgirl as she strutted around in her little school uniform. Cut to ten years later in 2010 and Miley Cyrus at just eighteen years old in her video “Can’t Be Tamed” with strong lyrics like “don’t change me, I wanna fly, I wanna drive, I wanna be, I wanna go, I wanna be a part of something I don’t know.” But of course the video is all about sex, and Miley is the sex object of everyone in the video. This is a business like so many others run by men. The “Lolita” story gives us perfect evidence of the disparity between what a young girl may be feeling and how her actions are interpreted by older men. I’ll never forget hearing a radio interview with Adrian Lyne, the director of the 1998 remake of the film Lolita, in which he talked about the fifteen-year-old girl he chose for the title role. Apparently, she was chewing gum when she came in for her screen test, and when it was time for her to perform she took the gum from her mouth and stuck it to her leg so she could read the script. We can guess that she simply meant to save her gum for later. Well, that’s not what this sixtysomething man saw. He said it was one of the most “sensuous” gestures he had ever seen and that he knew instantly that she would get the part. This is the way teen girls are seen in our sexist culture—as a handy package of “innocent” and “seducer” rolled into one.

  No wonder girls can begin to distrust their instincts and act in counterintuitive ways. Girls may know what they are feeling, but they also feel an intense pressure, from inside and out, to go against their feelings and conform to societal pressures and messages. They’re usually dealing with intense school pressure, they’re busy negotiating greater independence from their parents, and at the same time they are being bombarded with advertisements and articles and imagery that are constantly telling them how to be sexier. Advertisers, TV sitcoms, magazines, music videos, overexposure through social media—the whole world is telling them it’s great to become a woman, it’s great to be sexy and attractive, and it’s great to have sex.

  One of my clients who was an incest survivor wrote at twenty:

  No one saw all the pain and suffering locked inside me when I was thirteen, no one took me aside and told me I would be all right. I wish I could go back and look at that girl. Because I think I would tell her to stop giving herself away, to keep some part of her soul for her own, to tell the truth, everywhere and always. To stay out of the myths and conspiracies and the “protection” of the family. I would hold her and tell her to live for herself, and to get the hell away from the crazy people.

  All this said, as difficult as adolescence can be, it can also be a time of wonderment. Many girls fall in love for the first time before they are eighteen, and many girls have loving, beautiful relationships with boyfriends or girlfriends. And, even if you are an abuse survivor or you come from a family with lots of troubles, you too can find this comfort and love once you leave your abuse behind you.

  CHAPTER 4

  TROUBLED FAMILIES

  Daughters Betrayed

  That incest survivor who wanted to go back and hold the thirteen-year-old girl who had been so damaged knew, at twenty, that her family was crazy to allow the abuse and not protect her. That’s how sexual abuse happens. Innocent children need guidance and protection and don’t receive it. In some fundamental way, all sexual abuse, with the exception of stranger rape, is about families fail
ing their children. Girls would rather blame themselves, would rather hold their abuse inside, than go to their parents when they know that their parents would not believe them, would blame them, would fall apart if they knew. This is failure on a massive scale.

  In the coming chapters, you will be meeting many girls whose parents failed them. Amber, whom you will meet in Chapter 10, had parents who may have loved her but were “old world” and not emotionally equipped to help her with the unhealthy sexual relationship she’d developed at camp with an older boy. Coral, in Chapter 7, suffered incest at the hands of her biological father for six years because she knew her mother, who turned out to also be an incest survivor, would not protect her. Sage’s parents (Chapter 8) were too preoccupied to notice that anything was wrong. And on it goes. None of these girls had the kind of family support that makes a girl feel protected and cared for, loved and cherished.

  It doesn’t matter what kind of family you live in—one parent, two parent, grandparent, foster, or adoptive: when the adults you count on to protect you aren’t there for you, you are more vulnerable to being abused both inside and outside the four walls of home.

  Of course, it’s dangerous to make too many sweeping generalizations about families where abuse occurs. There are well-meaning families who are just blocked from their own troubles. This can include a history with, for example, addiction, which can blind family members, as we hear in Chapter 14 with Emily’s mother. The point is simply this: if you were sexually abused and could not go to your family for support, you deserve to realize that your family failed you fundamentally. Your parents did not provide a safe atmosphere of support and protection for their children, which is a parent’s first responsibility. It was not your fault. You were abused because no one was there to protect you or teach you the necessary skills to be safe.

  Of course, some families do give abused girls the support they need, but those girls are not the invisible ones with the deep scars, because they knew they had no support from their families. If you were abused, even randomly by a stranger, and did not feel safe enough to run to your parents for protection, if you feel in any way that your parents would blame you for the abuse, would fail to stand up for you, would not confront your abuser, it is important for you to understand that the problem lies in your family, not in you. You’ll see this clearly when you read the other girls’ stories.

  INCEST FAMILIES

  I was such a little girl then and I knew it felt bad and I knew it hurt, but my daddy said it was the right thing to do, our little secret. He said it would upset my mommy to know. My mom never asked why my daddy always needed to give me a bath, so I never told her. I would just sit there in the tub, numb, and listen to her footsteps as she walked by the closed door.

  —a seventeen-year-old incest survivor

  I believe that incest families are unhealthy and unsupportive families if only because they don’t protect their daughters. Men don’t get away with incest when a strong, able, in-tune mother is present. They just don’t. Incest continues when girls know they wouldn’t be safe telling. They know their mothers can’t or won’t protect them. I have spoken to hundreds of girls who tell me they would rather be molested by their fathers and stepfathers than face the possible blame and rejection of their mothers. Of course, sometimes these girls don’t have a mother alive, or with them. But in the great majority of cases the mother is present and simply can’t cope with the reality of the abuse. There are exceptions when the mother is loving but has a history so deep and damaged that she cannot tune in. We meet some of these mothers in Chapters 14 and 17. These are mothers who fiercely love their daughters yet were blind to the incest taking place.

  Many of our mothers were themselves sexually abused, either as children or as adults or both. Although the beginnings of an open dialogue about sex abuse and incest is starting to take place, sex abuse was not even talked about before the late 1990s. Did you know that until 1970s the only way to prove rape in a court of law was for a woman’s testimony to be corroborated by other evidence such as a witness? This law was derived from the seventeenth century! Again, feminist attorneys worked to change the laws and now we have rape kits (more in Chapter 11). The point is, even if your great-grandmothers, grandmothers, or mothers suffered incest, there was no conversation about it and the laws did not protect them.

  Thus, historically, women learned to put up with whatever men dished out. They felt they had to, and they’ve passed along that passivity and fear to their daughters. Since they were not able to heal from their own trauma, they often carry their damaged self-esteem, their addiction, or their mental illness into their roles as mothers. But you have a chance to do things differently.

  One of my clients tells a remarkable story. When she finally told her mother and grandmother that her great-grandfather had molested her when she was a little girl, her grandmother said, “He molested me, too.” And her mother said, “Me, too.” But when my client tried to dig a little deeper, both women clammed up. Here were three generations of abuse survivors, and still they couldn’t quite face up to the truth. You can break the cycle.

  EMOTIONALLY UNSUPPORTIVE FAMILIES

  It’s not just in incest families that families let their daughters down. I’ve worked with many girls whose families ignored their pleas for help after an experience of sexual abuse. I’ve had girls tell me of parents who blamed them after they spoke of being pushed too far by their boyfriends, called them sluts and whores, and accused them of “asking for it.” In Chapter 8, “Too Close for Comfort,” Sage talks about getting thrown out of the house at eighteen because she was “too much trouble.” Often these girls are in a real bind, too. They might want to go on to college, but they’re often on their own financially. Some are caught in the financial trap of being claimed as dependents on their parents’ taxes—and thus unable to get financial aid—even though their parents are no longer supporting them.

  Another way parents let their daughters down is by having no clear boundaries—not just emotional boundaries but also physical ones. I consider certain actions that might not be incest per se to be incestuous. For example, I have heard many stories from girls whose fathers walked around naked or never shut the door when they were getting dressed or made suggestive comments to their daughters about their breasts or “asses.” Often, when these girls spoke up to protest their father’s behavior, their families accused them of being prudish or repressed, and the girls developed real insecurities about their own rights to boundaries. Their families made them feel that something was wrong with them for being uncomfortable or being modest around their fathers.

  Fathers don’t have to rape their daughters or do anything secretive or behind closed doors to effectively violate and silence their daughters. Girls know when their feelings will not be respected or when it’s not safe to set their own terms within the family. Girls left voiceless like this are at much greater risk of being abused.

  When we are small children, we depend on our parents for everything. Without them, we would be unprotected. Without them we would be unclothed, unfed, uncared for. We begin in the world needing our parents for survival, and as life goes on they are the ones we should be able to turn to for comfort and guidance.

  But our families sometimes either do not guide us at all or give us poor guidance. I’ve worked with many girls whose parents simply couldn’t cope, where the kids had to take on the role of adults, with no one to protect them, as well as girls from families where kids have no voice at all; families where the parents are too busy, too wrapped up in their own lives to notice; and families where girls are made to feel ashamed of their sexuality. The list goes on.

  The fact that so many families betray their daughters is just another symptom of the way our culture perpetuates male domination. For all the gains women have made, girls still struggle to make their voices heard, to have power. And girls whose parents can’t take proper care of them are left to float without a life preserver. They are made to fend for them
selves to navigate their sexuality and emotions; they are more or less set up to be mistreated because they have not been taught how valuable they are as human beings.

  During adolescence, girls are just beginning to seek full expression of themselves, and if that expression is blocked, girls tend to go either inward into depression or outward to unhealthy behaviors. This is why I believe so strongly that, for girls who have been sexually abused, now is the time to talk about what happened to you, to express the emotions surrounding your sexual abuse, to expel all the difficult feelings about the abuse and begin to heal. You are still young enough to get rid of the emotional baggage of sexual abuse that might otherwise haunt you into adulthood. You are young enough to become whole, to become visible, to heal. Believe me, once you start to realize that you have the right to voice what happened to you—when you stop feeling it was too big or too small, and you just accept that it is safe and healthy to disclose your sexual abuse to a trusted friend or adult—you will feel as if a cloud has stopped following you around. You will feel lighter and stronger. I promise.

  In a perfect world, of course, there would be no sexual abuse. Men and boys simply wouldn’t cross the line, and, if they ever tried, girls wouldn’t be afraid to fight back or speak up. They would be able to count on support, and they’d know that they would be believed. With all the voices now driving the #MeToo movement, with girls speaking out in huge numbers, with the heightened social media exposure, be aware there is pushback. Pushback by friends and acquaintances on the Internet, pushback by the talking heads in media. You may get ten positive comments on your feed, but that one comment that puts you down or disbelieves you can really hurt. Make sure to protect yourself; call in your posse if you feel vulnerable disclosing. Because this isn’t a perfect world, of course you’ll need to find the people who will advocate for you and protect you and cherish you. Friends, aunts, cousins, teachers, counselors—these are the people who can be your anchor in the world when your immediate family fails you.