You live in the world with other people. Secrecy-maintaining is affected by the way people around you think and behave. Your fears may be based upon the way some people really act. On the other hand, you may also have been catastrophizing yourself into silence and isolation. You may have filtered out the sources of support that you have, or that could be available to you. The secrecy of victimization requires more than re-thinking to resolve it. It requires sharing with another human being. It requires naming the victimization out loud.
You are on the cutting edge of history. Yes you are. Sexual victimization has been a part of our world for ages - an unpleasant fact which has been coming clear just in the last few years - recent history. You are part of the élite company of individuals who are breaking silence, interrupting the cycle of abuse, and bringing it into the open.
In doing this, you are coming face-to-face with the crapped up thinking about sex and sexual victimization that pollutes our world. As you change, you help the world to change. Those who thought that talk of the sexual victimization epidemic was the hysterical raving of burned out human service workers are being silenced by the flood of truth from people like yourself. You are all a potent force of change and healing. You are part of something bigger. Pioneering is tough work.
Complicating things is this: Proof of victimization - solid, legal evidence (forensic proof) is hard to come by in many cases. When you come out with your unfortunate news, the result may be that the offender will be charged with a criminal act. He or she will usually fail to admit guilt.
Most sex offenders will lie. In some cases it is difficult to prove that an offender is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Remember that it is not your job to investigate criminal code violations. You are not responsible for the success or failure of the legal system. You are responsible for your own life and your healing. Convictions do happen even when it is a victim's word against an offender's word.
In spite of themselves, some of the people around you will probably be helping to sustain your fear of disclosure. They may very well be wonderful people. Sexual victimization isn't something that the average person can speak about comfortably. It is something about which the average person is very uninformed. The let's just get on with life and skip this part attitude of others, will do you no favours.
If you share the same family or the same social circle as the person who sexually victimized you, there will be individuals in that circle who doubt your word. This is called denial. You may be called a liar.
Another thing that will happen is called minimization, which means to make small. It means that while some people may doubt your word, others may treat it lightly, as a small misunderstanding, or they may hold you to blame, partially or totally. Boys will be boys. You must have done something to give him the wrong idea. You're gorgeous - what's a guy to do. If you didn't protest, you must have wanted it. Some people will try to ignore your truth.
For example, you might expect that the mother of a child who has disclosed sexual abuse by his or her father will automatically side with the child. This doesn't always happen. Sometimes the non-offending parent will side with the offending parent, but not the child. Within the life and the mental set of the non-offending parent, there are reasons for this behaviour. Nonetheless, it is a cruel, rejecting shut-down experience for a child. This may have happened to you. Now that you are no longer a child, and you have the ability to think in adult ways, you can overcome this shut-down thinking that has silenced you. You can overcome the rejection.
Many people who were victimized as children report attempts to communicate about their abuse - attempts which failed due to the denial and minimization of others. In fact, I have not met anyone who, as a child, did not try to let somebody know. Very often, the child was not heard.
Denying the word of children and accepting the word of adults is also a problem for the court system. It sometimes looks like a built-in bias against children. Then there is the court process itself. It's a system built on pitting rival views one against the other. Bad news for children. It is tough on all victims.
Regardless of your age at the time of your victimization, some people will believe you. Some will not. This may happen. Stay tuned - it is a surmountable obstacle. Hear?
What will happen when I speak openly about my victimization? is the question. Using habituated, traumatic thinking to leap to conclusions creates the immobilizing fear. Making a tough road tougher is a double whammy.
Here are some of the consequences of disclosure that are feared by victimized people:
Violence from the offender or his friends - "If I tell, he might kill me or my family. His friends might beat me up. He might tell the whole town that I'm a lying bitch."
Family rejection or rejection by friends - "They will hate me. They will be disgusted by me. They will think I'm evil."
Causing harm to the offender - "Daddy might go to jail. He might kill himself if I tell. Everyone might hate him."
Not all victims, particularly children, want their offenders put into jail. Children don't want to be victimized, and some of them love their offending fathers or mothers.
The nature of the victimization experience itself reinforces secrecy. Victimization causes denial by the victim - often confused with deliberate lying. "Why did you wait so long before you spoke out? You must be negligent or lying!" says the offender's lawyer or the ill-informed investigator.
Lying and denial may look very similar to some legal folks, but psychologically, they are worlds apart.
Now hear this: Denial by the victim is a healthy response, only causing problems when it becomes habituated to the point of stalling the inner healing drive. It functions very much like the scab which forms naturally over a scrape on your elbow. It is protection. It is natural. It is healthy. It is a necessary first step on the healing trail.
The thing that separates sexual victimization from other forms of victimization is the sex part. There is skin contact, genital stimulation, pain, fear, and even sexual arousal. That's right. Sexual arousal, mixed with other conflicting, confusing emotions and body sensations, occurs in many victimization experiences. If this happened to you, it definitely doesn't mean that you are warped or sick in any way. It doesn't mean that you wanted to be victimized. It means that the sensory nerves of your genitals and your body as a whole are working the way they were designed.
Sexual stimulation is an intimate, extremely private, personal experience. The traumatic invasion into this naturally private area will result in a desire for secrecy. Secrecy-maintaining is not the same thing as the willful withholding of evidence.
In the re-victimization experience, the separation of the episodes of sexualized violence from the regular flow of normal life can become pronounced, and will support secrecy automatically. When other family members are denying the sexual abuse in their midst, the secrecy-maintaining forces can reign supreme for years. So, if you have broken the secrecy condition or are even contemplating doing so, I salute you and your courage.
Getting through a re-victimization experience means that you have had to develop ways of shutting off the experience, escaping out of your body perhaps (detaching, dissociating), and getting by in any way that you could. Secrecy is a by-product of this habit-forming survival strategy. No blame.
Secrecy-maintaining is built into the sexual victimization experience.