Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  Martin eventually said that he needed to hire someone to clean his apartment and suggested that Ashley take the job. “I cleaned for a couple of hours, thought I had done a good job, and he said, ‘You need to do it again. This isn’t clean enough,’ and was very harsh with me.” He offered her liquor; once she was drunk, he sodomized her twice anally.

  In retrospect, the situation was clear to Ashley. “He knew what he had: a kid who wasn’t being watched, who really wanted out of a very hostile and unpredictable home,” she said. “He had food and transportation, these things my parents weren’t going to provide. He had a nice apartment and a good job.” Those advantages seemed like a step forward, so Ashley broke up with her boyfriend, dropped out of high school, and moved in with Martin. He turned out to be a drug user like her parents.

  At seventeen, she became pregnant. Martin grew increasingly violent as the pregnancy progressed, beating Ashley so severely that she twice ran away to a shelter for battered women; once he stabbed her and she nearly died. “I was afraid he was either going to kill our child from beating me or take her from me when she was born,” Ashley said. “I used to think if I could just take her from my stomach and hide her somewhere, maybe she would be born alive. I would pray, ‘God, if you let my baby live, I’ll be a good mother.’” In deference to her religious grandmother, Ashley married Martin just before their daughter was born. The beatings had put her repeatedly in preterm labor, a dangerous condition that can be brought on by stress; she held the pregnancy through multiple bouts, but when she felt the baby was really coming, she asked Martin to drive her to the hospital. He detoured to buy cocaine on the way, and Ashley arrived too late to receive licit drugs to blunt the pain of delivery.

  Ashley instinctively loved her newborn girl, Sylvia, but had no idea what to do as a mother. “I was afraid of her. She was very colicky and very temperamental and cried day and night,” Ashley remembered. The beatings continued, and sometimes Ashley could barely move. Ashley’s aunt had persuaded her to report the abuse, so Martin moved them all to Alabama, beyond the reach of Florida law. When Sylvia was five months old, Ashley escaped with her to a shelter in Florida. They were allowed to stay for thirty days, and during that time Ashley got a driver’s license, a car, and a job; arranged to stay with someone from her church until she found an apartment; and filed for divorce. When the baby would fall asleep, Ashley remembered, “I’d thank God I had her for one more day.”

  As the months passed, however, Ashley increasingly doubted her ability to take care of Sylvia on her own. When she worked, she lost food-stamp eligibility. Sylvia was getting sick frequently, so they needed better health insurance. So Ashley became a welfare mom, which meant better health care, but not enough money for rent. After a desperate year, she went back to Martin. “The day I packed my stuff, I still believed that he would get help and be okay,” she said, “and we would be a family.” Instead, Martin assaulted her sexually, then took Sylvia and sued for divorce. Ashley didn’t see her daughter for three and a half months. Eventually she was granted joint custody, contingent on her continuing to live in Alabama. “It was like being held hostage,” she said. Martin made a big show of his mistreatment of Sylvia. “He pulled up one day and there was marijuana smoke rolling out of the car. He actually tried to French-kiss her in front of me when she was three. She would come home with big bruises and knocks on her head.”

  Sylvia’s underlying personality did not make things easier. “She was a very unhappy little baby, and I felt such guilt,” Ashley said. “I was afraid to even bathe her, like her genital area. I was afraid I would do something because of the abuse I’d grown up with. She threw tantrums and pulled my hair out; she bloodied my nose one time. I got her a kitten when she was two. She would take that cat by the back legs and throw it on the couch, and she would sit on it and pull its whiskers out. I don’t know if it’s the violence that she’s seen, the violence that’s happening to her ongoing, what happened while she was still inside me and I was getting beat up, or if she was just born like him.”

  Ashley felt powerless. “When she was five, I was bathing her one day in the tub with me, and she told me that her dad and her did the same thing. I called a therapist, and she said, ‘Don’t ask her any more questions. Just bring her in.’ It was worse than I had thought. The psychologist said that he was not only bathing with her, but he was having her wash his genitals, and doing things around her private area.” Ashley filed for a protective order; Martin brought a countersuit seeking exclusive custody on grounds that Ashley was lying. Ashley had a clean record; Martin had previous convictions for drug possession and for beating Ashley and had been put in court-ordered therapy for violence. In the Alabama courts, however, he won. After the ruling, Ashley attempted suicide. Sylvia later complained to Ashley that Martin had walked in on her naked, climbed in the shower with her, hit her, and denied her food and medical care. Ashley returned to court and sued for custody again, appearing before the same judge. “I had tape-recorded phone conversations of her telling me about all this abuse, but he didn’t allow me to play them. Instead, he ordered I would have to pay all of my husband’s legal bills, fourteen thousand dollars. Now I’m terrified they’re going to put me in jail.”

  She finally gave up on her daughter. “It’s just too much trauma,” Ashley said. “It’s not that I don’t love her. It’s not that I don’t want her to be free from that. It’s that for whatever reason, God has seen fit for her to be there. God has seen fit for us not to have a relationship. And I’ve done everything I can do.”

  At twenty-six, Ashley decided to go to college. She graduated with a 3.8 average and became a qualified community counselor. Like Marina James, Brenda Henriques, Lisa Boynton, and Tina Gordon, Ashley has helped herself by helping others—but she has worked with offenders, not just with victims. “Most of them, the higher-functioning ones, were very socially skilled. They seemed like the nicest people you could ever meet, some of them; they’re very socially skilled and they make people very comfortable, and that’s how they accomplish what they do and that’s how they keep their victims quiet. So, I learned a great deal when I was there and did a lot of healing of my own, and I think helped other people heal, offenders heal.”

  Eventually she met a man with whom she bore another daughter, in a “consensual, child-wanting, of-age, in-love relationship.” Alicia was born with profound hearing loss in her left ear; her acquisition of speech was delayed and her articulation poor. After she was diagnosed with other delays, her father left, unable to cope. “She’s a special-needs child, and that can be very trying at times, but I have very different feelings for Alicia versus Sylvia,” Ashley said. “I think she’s the reason I graduated with my bachelor’s—and the reason I lived.” Still, the shadow of Sylvia’s deterioration loomed, especially when Alicia reached the age at which Sylvia had been taken away from her mother. “I looked at her last night. She was sleeping. And she looked a little bit like Sylvia, and I had to turn my head because I’m afraid she’s going to die or I’m going to lose custody of her. I think this is the time to talk about statutory rape and how damaging it is: the injustice of having a child with an adult more than twice my age. I know that probably doesn’t sound as serious as some stranger holding you down and forcibly raping you, but it has been for me and for our child, who will never be okay.”

  Statutory rape is a category that has often been abused. Someone I interviewed was arrested when he was found having sex with his girlfriend, who was six months younger than he, an underage seventeen to his legally adult eighteen, even though his girlfriend’s parents approved of the relationship. The principle that no one over the age of eighteen should ever be allowed to have carnal relations with anyone under the age of eighteen can be hard to defend in such circumstances. It is nonetheless evident that in many situations statutory rape is rape. The influence men such as Martin can have over young girls who have been neglected or ill-treated by their own parents is difficult to exaggerate.
r />   At fourteen, Sylvia appeared destroyed by her young lifetime of abuse. “She dresses like a boy,” Ashley said. “You can’t really tell that she’s a girl. She’s filthy and she smells horrible. She has psychotic-type symptoms.” Talking about it, Ashley began to cry, then to stutter. Apologizing, she said, “The last visit I had with her, she told me she heard voices. One of the things that she talked about was her dad would come while she was changing clothes or showering, which is why now she doesn’t shower and doesn’t change her clothes.”

  Ashley is unable to work because she is taking care of Alicia full-time; she lives on less than $300 a month in an income-based apartment. Although she no longer sees Sylvia, she still pays child support to her onetime rapist out of the child support that she gets for Alicia. She has taken down all the pictures of Sylvia. “I have physical scars on my body from his abuse of me,” Ashley said. “He’s made her into another scar. I can’t even stand to look at her. I would welcome her with open arms, I would go to therapy with her, but I would probably not let her in my home. I would be afraid she would abuse Alicia. I wish I had never had her. If I could go back, I would have aborted or I would have given her up for adoption. It hasn’t been fair to me and it hasn’t been fair to her.”

  • • •

  A recent study has identified “coerced childbearing as a weapon in the arsenal of power and control.” Numerous women who have been raped within relationships speak of the rape as a means used by a man to keep her under his thumb, the classic ploy of domination by keeping a wife “barefoot and pregnant.” Women in surveys have variously said, “He raped me to keep me pregnant all the time because he knew I would never leave the kids,” and “They own you when you have a child by him—part of the purpose in having a baby is to control you.” As the mothers’ children bear witness to ongoing sexual violence, they are more likely to be traumatized, and to be both victims of and perpetrators of sexual abuse themselves.

  Although no one ever deserves to be raped, a woman’s actions can have an enormous impact on her own safety. Yet some women repeatedly put themselves in situations of extreme vulnerability. Most of us anticipate bad things that could happen, but some are capable of reacting only to events that have already occurred. Talking to many women who had borne children of rape, I was struck by their inability to foresee the likelihood of danger inherent in their choices. Every bad thing that befell them, even at the hands of previous aggressors, came as a surprise. They could not tell the difference between people who warranted trust and those who didn’t. They lacked guiding intuition and were blind to bad character until it manifested itself.

  Nearly all such women I met had not been cherished or protected as children. At the most basic level, they did not know what caring behavior felt like, so they were unable to recognize it. Some were desperate for love and attention, which made them easy targets. Most were so familiar with neglect or abuse that they accepted it when it came their way; for many, abuse was synonymous with intimacy. Some who actively strove to improve their situation found themselves merely repeating their past; they kept falling back into the familiar muck.

  • • •

  It is difficult to imagine who Mindy Woods might be if her uncle had not started molesting her when she was ten. He lived next door in their small town in the Midwest. He molested her older sister for nine years, and Mindy every week or so for seven, sometimes while his own young daughters were in the room. He started in with their cousin when she was a small child, but she put a stop to it at thirteen, when she filed a police report. A detective came over to interview Mindy, but she clammed up. Her uncle negotiated a plea bargain, resulting in nothing more than community service and a fine. “My grandma saw it,” Mindy recalled, “and she just used to call my sister and me sluts—ten-year-old sluts, quite a concept.” In pictures of Mindy from third grade, she’s a little slip of a girl. The next year, after the abuse began, she was twice as heavy, and by her senior year of high school, she weighed 275 pounds.

  Mindy went off to college, but came home after three months. At twenty-one, she married “the first guy that ever let me cry all night and just held me.” She tried to have children but was unable to conceive and could not find sexual satisfaction in her marriage. She divorced at twenty-five and traveled around the country with a truck driver she met on the Internet, eventually getting a trucker’s license herself. Seeking to be subjugated by powerful “masters,” she entered into the world of BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadomasochism). “My uncle made me that way. He molded me sexually,” she said. “I don’t think it’s wanting to be a victim again. I think it’s more analyzing. I want to figure out what I was feeling, what was going through my mind, and why the hell I let him do it.”

  BDSM relationships are supposed to be guided by mutuality; the slave consents to be led by her master, who putatively treats her with respect even as he commands her behavior. Seeking such a master, Mindy met a man from Michigan online; he turned out to be a psychopath. “You can be somebody who punishes somebody, who sets down rules and expects you to obey them, and still be a loving person,” Mindy said. “There’s a difference between punishment and abuse. A master is supposed to have love and respect for the submissive. It’s called a gift of submission.” The Michigander had erectile dysfunction owing to diabetes and never had intercourse with her; instead he raped her with objects, including a broomstick. He kept her locked in the house and told her that the neighbors were paid to call him if she tried to leave. It took her three months to escape. She was able to get online long enough to find “a place set up to rescue submissives who needed help,” and the people there took her to a safe house.

  When she left the safe house, she went to stay with a friend, Mamie, who was getting ready to be married and had asked Mindy to be her maid of honor. Mamie was pregnant and living with her fiancé, who was flirtatious in what Mindy took to be a friendly way. “It was in front of his wife-to-be, and she laughed,” Mindy said, “so I thought it was okay.” Mindy came down with a bad flu shortly after she arrived and started taking codeine cough syrup. She woke one night, groggy and confused, to find Mamie’s fiancé having sex with her, whispering in her ear that he was going to make her pregnant. “I thought it was some weird nightmare from the codeine,” she said. Mindy had learned with her uncle how to pretend that sexual assaults were not happening, and she woke up the next day and went about her business as usual. The second time, he put a pillow over her face to prevent her from crying out. The third time, Mamie walked in just as he was finishing up, and her fiancé said that he had been giving Mindy a massage for her back problems. Mindy remained mute and submissive. “I was just so afraid,” Mindy said. “He knew I was extremely vulnerable and he knew that I didn’t prosecute my uncle, that I didn’t prosecute the idiot in Michigan—he knew my history of just letting things drop.” Mindy stayed on at the house and was maid of honor at the wedding.

  When she got home, Mindy went to her gynecologist and said she had been raped. She found out that she was pregnant. “I didn’t have the money to get an abortion myself,” she said. “I knew my parents would have shunned me if they’d found out. My mom is a born-again Christian. So if I still wanted to be in the family, I needed to keep the kid.” Mindy went into a severe depression, and the fibromyalgia from which she had long suffered began to escalate, putting her in constant pain. “If I had not been pregnant, I probably would have killed myself,” she recalled. “I’ve thought about suicide my whole life, ever since my uncle.”

  When she was four months along, Mindy met Larry Foster, and she was still with him four years later when I was introduced to her. “He knew everything before he decided to move in with me,” Mindy told me. He was in the delivery room when she gave birth to Gretel and put his name on her birth certificate. Mindy was relieved when she had a girl. “I haven’t had very good luck with males,” she said. Mindy, who weighs over three hundred pounds, wears both the collar of her submission to Larry and a pentacle that signifie
s her Wiccan belief system. “I’m not Miss Betty Crocker or Martha Stewart or a neat freak who bakes and has dresses, like his mom and grandma, but they’re relatively accepting,” she said. Still, she feels unequal to motherhood. “Part of being a mom is actually exerting a little authority over a kid. I’m submissive. I have no authority.”

  Having your mother in a dog collar, obeying orders, does not necessarily help build a little girl’s self-esteem. Mindy sometimes calls Larry “Master” around the house. Gretel calls him “Daddy.” “I would get upset with her if she called him Larry, just the same as I would get upset with her if she called him Master, and to me that’s just a normal parent thing,” Mindy said. She thinks she will eventually have to tell Gretel about her biological father, “but for now, I want her to just know Larry as Daddy.”

  Mindy takes medication for depression, diabetes, and fibromyalgia. “It’s hard for me sometimes to get my mind clear enough to form a sentence,” she said. “There are times I can’t pick Gretel up. I’ll sit down and she’ll crawl up in my lap, but if she starts squirming around, I can’t take it. That’s driving a wedge between her and me.” The relationship with Gretel has some of the same quality of resignation that typifies Mindy’s submissive relationships with men. “She is a constant reminder,” Mindy said. “She’s annoying, but what three-year-old isn’t? There have been a lot of times that I’ve wanted to drop her off at a street corner somewhere and leave. I want to blame the fact that I don’t have a life on her. Then I think about it, and I do have a life. My life is her. And once I get into that mentality, I love her to death.” Then, in the next breath, Mindy added, “I still wish I’d miscarried and didn’t have her.”