To Survivors of Serial Child Rapist Jerry Sandusky

I watched Pacino do “Paterno” last night as an elderly, uncomprehending conspirator at the end of his life waking up to a realization that he would forever be known for what he did not do. Whether or not it was fair to the man himself, survivors of serial child rapist Jerry Sandusky deserved better than the selfish moral deflection that continues to this day and impedes the healing of hundreds.

Shame on those who turned a blind eye. They may have been good to other people in other ways, but they failed miserably when it came to protecting the vulnerable. Imagine if just one of them had stood in front the survivors of serial child rapist Jerry Sandusky and said:

“This was in no way your fault. It was wrong and life-changing in a hurtful and challenging way. You are incredibly brave to have survived this awful thing. I am so sorry. Always remember. The shame is not on you but those of us who failed you. Shame on us!

“We have failed you so terribly. You did not deserve this. We will do everything in our power to help you heal. We will help you sort out your emotions while we continually acknowledge our complicity and seek forgiveness but never expect it.”

“You have been traumatized because of our sheer unwillingness to stop people like serial child rapist Jerry Sandusky. Instead, we left it to you. We failed you miserably.

“We will see to it from this moment on that you are safe from such predators as serial child rapist Jerry Sandusky. We will provide the lifelong therapy, and the physical and emotional training you will need to navigate this trauma and deal with lingering injuries. We will provide the education of your choice.

“We will personally pay for a memorial honoring each of you as survivors, and reminding us to never, ever fail this way again. We will invite survivors to work with artists to help this process provide a modicum of catharsis. We will provide the space for this as well as a center for support groups and an academic program focused on the personal and societal impact of childhood rape and its pervasiveness.

“This program will emphasize the use of unmitigated terms for child rape. It will be made clear that ‘molest’ means sexual violation. We will facilitate ongoing awareness of the words, signals and behaviors that demand further attention so that never again will someone credibly be able to plead ignorance for doing nothing.”

“Above all, we are sorry. We acknowledge there is no gradation of guilt here. We have failed you. We have failed ourselves and our communities. We have failed, and we will now commit our lifetime to learning from this failure rather than defending it.”

What survivors got instead was the leadership of one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the country turning “child rape” into “horsing around.”

The rape of a child is incomprehensible to all civilized and decent human beings. Many people would be traumatized if they accidentally witnessed a 6-foot-3-inch, 225-pound man raping a 10-year-old. In fact, if they didn’t tell someone else right away, they may even convince themselves they didn’t see what they saw.

Courses on how to respond should be as ubiquitous as CPR classes, if not more so. Every one of serial child rapist Jerry Sandusky’s survivors received a life sentence of trauma that if not addressed, can be just as deadly as a heart attack.

May you all get the care and healing you do deserve.

The Trauma Awakening

As I watch events unfold around me; as I watch children insisting on their lives, I wonder… are we splitting as a species? From the destructive, ravaging side of sapiens to a more aware, advanced homo illustratum? Are we in the throes of this cladogenesis? Are we amid speciation growing pains? Were the sixties actually the “Dawning of the Age of Aquarius?”

With every fiber of my being, I certainly hope so.

What I’m seeing now, with #MeToo, Times Up, Black Lives Matter, March for Our Lives—is survivors uniting through the shared experience of trauma. We know that trauma has specific effects on neural pathways, and that these play out in emotional injuries and physical illnesses. We know that trauma changes a living thing permanently. We know that trauma is handed from one generation to the next through conditioning, which in turn may affect our DNA. The science is out on that one, or rather—it is a parade of blindfolded travelers encountering Ganesha.

Our belief in our ability to “know” far exceeds the reality of our knowledge.

We are still a species that will kill one another over rocks. Anyone vaguely cognizant of our ravenous, profligate nature and its impact can see there’s a code flaw. As with conceptual, self-healing artificial intelligence, perhaps the dawning awareness is our frontal cortex trying to overtake the lizard brain before it gets us all killed. I wonder if, within my lifetime, there will be a rapid shift. Will we see ourselves becoming illustratum—a species that will reverse-engineer us back to the paradise earth once was?

With every fiber of my being, I certainly hope so.

The social movements we see now are the clarion call of enlightenment—the raised voice of suffering saying, “no more.” We have pilloried one another, ourselves, our earth and everything in it long enough. Saber-tooth tigers are no longer trying to chase us down and eat us. It would be good to stop behaving as if they are. This fear-based desperation drives toxic aggression. Toxic aggression drives racism, sexism, bullying, sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, greed and violence of every sort—from the raised finger in traffic to the flooding of Glen Canyon to the caustic mentality behind nuclear destruction.

Those associations may seem like a stretch because violence is so utterly ingrained into so many things that we do that it requires deliberate attention. A willingness to investigate our own behaviors and the courage to face what we find rather than seek the ongoing comfort of delusion and drunken consumption. E.g., years ago, we discovered our use of plastics was creating a massive pestilent cesspool between the West Coast and Hawaii. We react by spending half a paycheck on plastic packaging at Costco and Trader Joe’s, because the larger reality of the impact has not yet touched us directly.

Am I equating incest, for example, with buying plastic-wrapped tubes of plastic? To a degree, yes. Both are a perpetration. Both cause trauma. Both come from a place in the human ego resistant to taking responsibility for the outcome. Each is an artifice of toxic aggression.

There may or may not still be time to change before the Garbage Patch reaches our front steps. The human ego does not awaken easily and is now subject to greater distraction than ever before. The one phenomenon known to rapidly expand awareness beyond ego is trauma. Waking up to a stinking, decaying landscape of refuse would be traumatic to most reasonable people, and I am of a mind that most people are reasonable.

Shortfalls of Therapy

It’s not easy to find the right therapist. A good therapist isn’t necessarily the right therapist.

My current therapist is a survivor. The difference in our discussions versus those I’ve had with non-survivor therapists is that she understands what I am experiencing directly rather than indirectly through observation. We have a camaraderie through doors ripped opened by #MeToo.

There are a lot of good therapists, but there are also a lot of highly educated, minimally informed individuals in the mental health fields who are not outright predators, but simply incompetent. Mental health is not plastic surgery, where incompetence is hard to hide. Mental health is vastly larger to comprehend and far, far more complex to treat.

A therapist should be sufficiently versed in neuroscience and trauma to be able to identify the difference between someone born with the wiring of depression, obsession, phobias, etc. and someone with acquired mental illness. I hesitate to even use the term “mental illness” here because our understanding of it is primitive. We are one generation away from Stephen Hawking being institutionalized.

Describing the spectrum of mental and emotional responses that come with childhood sexual abuse as an “illness” is incorrect. It is an injury. The sooner it is properly treated, the sooner it begins to heal. When someone breaks a leg, we put it in a cast so it will heal straight. We don’t just leave it to mend itself at a bent and twisted angle that will torment the injured person with lifelong pain and physical limitation. But we do this with our own mental health in large part because of our history of weaponizing shame.

We are just starting to discuss the human experience of depression in the proper, if elementary, clinical terms. My father was ashamed of his depression and tried to hide it and cope with it on his own and on his family for most of his life. Something broke his emotional well-being and was never encouraged to properly mend because depression means your mind is weak, he once told me. Though not a Scientologist, he was influenced by the dogma. It was only after precipitous weight loss and unrelenting darkness in his 70s was he finally persuaded to speak to a physician about depression.

He was prescribed Prozac and sent to speak with a therapist via satellite video—I suppose for lack of options, since my folks lived so remotely. But whomever thought a World War II veteran from farm country would describe his darkest secrets to a screen was woefully ignorant of human psychology. My father had more satellite TV options than accessible mental-health treatment options.

I first took myself to a psychiatrist when I was 16. I drove 50 miles one way to see him. I told him I was in a self-destructive spiral (that I hadn’t yet connected to childhood incest) trying to save myself. He told me to meditate. I paid him cash in waitress tips and drove the 50 miles back into the darkness. I was out of his league.

That was 41 years ago. I’ve watched the mental health community trying to sort itself for four decades. One thing we’ve learned, thanks in large part to military veterans, is that camaraderie can achieve what no therapist or drug can ever do. It can make us feel understood and not alone, and that’s imperative, because there are not enough therapists to treat the growing throngs of survivors—of sexual abuse, of human trafficking, school shootings and traumas to numerous to imagine.

We need each other. Trauma survivors are one.

Invisible Family Dynamics

I am a strange-looking person. I can appear either regal or ozark incested, depending on the moment. I have the sharp profile of the Roman patricians on ancient coins, probably by way of the highlands, given the blue eyes and dark hair going gray.

My hair is a lot of work. It’s fine and breaks easily, so it doesn’t grow thick and long. I have often suspected that the endocrine onslaught of childhood sexual abuse affected it, as well as my early Franken-growth—days when I’d wake up and the ground was an inch farther away. I was a cartoon child with freakishly long legs, big feet, scraggly hair and budding breasts, standing on a homemade diving board over an irrigation canal at the age of nine, in an old Polaroid I managed to digitize long ago when I lived in New York.

I’m so glad I did. I’m not sure I would know she existed had I not. By then, I had been sexually abused by my brother and his friends for several years. It wasn’t constant, but more like guerrilla warfare. They were my only playmates. There were no little girls in my neighborhood—at least none that came anywhere near our house for long. Maybe everyone knew and did nothing, because that’s what you did.

Sexual abuse and its life-long mental torture slithers from generation to generation toxically masquerading as the sanctity of family. Rural, Midwestern people do not get involved. We do not talk about it. Virtually no one is capable. The best I, myself, can do, is write this random and vaguely anonymous blog.

My hair wants to be left alone. It was chopped off shortly after the picture on the diving board. My dad was not a barber. I was soon outfitted in a quilted PTO jacket. My parents had clearly seen in the old Polaroid that I was a girl. It caused them to panic from a place they’d never acknowledged with words, but with depression-fueled anger from my dad and terrified paralysis from my mother, who’d been abdominally eviscerated by inept country surgeons by that time.

My mother’s surgeries occurred before and after my brother and I were adopted. It started with a tubal pregnancy. The corn-country surgeons—many from World War I and mostly ignorant of the female body—took everything. Total hysterectomy. Put her on estrogen. She’s then a farm wife in a primogeniture family who can’t have kids, and there’s no such thing as therapy or survivor blogs. She and my adoptive father have zero guidance, compassion or commiseration in dealing with their guilt, shame and grief—their trauma—which naturally transferred to the next generation.

The complications from that initial surgical savagery required three more surgeries and culminated in her brief death on an operating table when my brother and I were around three and five years old.

Mom feared she would lose us. Only she and a few close relatives knew my father had a drug problem. I would later hear from their siblings that he was hooked on “narcotics,” which most likely was morphine. He’d been hospitalized for several weeks shortly after I was adopted. He told me once that he’d had gangrenous legs from spraying 2-4-D on waist-high weeds in the unused horse corral. I later heard phlebitis, which is associated with needle use. Whatever it was, some of his behavior—and the things that came out of his mouth—could only be explained by opioid addiction, the “epidemic” we all think is so new. Only talking about it is new.

Day 47 of Intuitive Trauma Recovery

This is Day 47, the longest period in which I have not had an alcoholic beverage in roughly four years. Never has a break been so noticeably improving of my health and mindset. Dark clouds are fewer and further between.

So something is working in this process, which heavily comprises nesting. Thankfully, I have a partner who is supplying the fireside space where I now nest in yoga pants, watching snow clouds release enough tiny six-sided water crystals to cover a mountain range.

I take my comfort and cues from nature. I have always felt safer with animals and the elements than with people, but I don’t fully equate that with the incest, abuse and absence of protection in childhood. All people buzz with energy. If you need confirmation, step into an elevator with a large angry man.

I am exhausted by the energies of people—our unwritten stories, hidden motives, needs and wants, styles of communication, layers of aware and unaware, trigger points and general inability to just sit quietly and look out of a window at a snowstorm in the mountains.

Drinking helped me endure people and the predatory energies that victimization attracts. Uninformed people like to parrot the phrase, “stop being a victim,” but the transit from victim to survivor is different for everyone. It doesn’t come easy. It takes time, and the support of other survivors—many of whom are just now starting to speak up.

For me, recovery involves more “being” and less “doing.” “Doing” is how we think we pass the time while it’s actually passing us. “Being” is naturally aligned with time. It has no preoccupation future or past. Attention is brought constantly into the moment. This takes practice, particularly in a stimuli-addicted society where getting our attention for even a few seconds at a time generates an enormous amount of money for someone who is not either of us.

As with all practices, having an instructor helps. I listen to the mindfulness lectures of Borscht Belt Buddhist philosopher Tara Brach. I recommend her podcast to anyone who deals with depression and anxiety. If you’re a survivor, you probably do.

Mindfulness is the practice of noticing but not identifying with your own thoughts. As simple as it sounds, mindfulness takes great effort because the survival brain is constantly convincing us that we are our thoughts. Noticing thoughts in a non-identified way first requires recognition of one’s own ego and the occasional willingness to part with it.

The ego may project pomposity or anxiety, but both are based on false constructs, like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. Mindfulness helps us remember to pull back the curtain when we’re in the grip of thought loops that drag us into depression and anxiety.

These loops—laid down into our developing brains like electrochemical grooves—cannot be re-recorded, but they can be replaced with a healthier habitual thought. One of the most helpful I have ever employed in my lifetime of negotiating depression and suicidal ideation is, “This, too, shall pass.” Not in terms of a dismissal, but with a stubborn perseverance that outlasts the depressive thought loop and thus reinforces itself.

Eventually, a space opens where depressive and suicidal thoughts no longer gain purchase, but float by like barely noticeable debris on the wind. When triggers fling us back into contact with them, we can always bring to mind the feeling of that larger space, where we know there’s room to contemplate that a snowflake is miracle of nature; a unique, ephemeral sculpture we have to look for to see.

Trusting Intuition

I am an incest survivor and I feel safe. I am here to tell other survivors that it’s possible to feel safe. My hope is, if you’re half my age or less, it will not take nearly as long. If you’re mid-fifties, like me, or older, please know that it will feel no less powerful. Your own body will no longer be frozen between fight or flight.

This paralysis happens because childhood sexual violations are like putting a hot branding iron to brain chemistry. The experience is traumatic, and the human body is programmed to register danger in order to avoid it in the future. Even people empowered enough as children to evade violators distinctly remember feeling uncomfortable during the encounter. The creepy uncle who made children sit in his lap. A groping grandma. A family friend who wouldn’t stop staring. Children intuitively recognize danger. Their bodies recognize danger.

As children, we learn how to respond to our intuition by watching adults. If an adult intervenes on our behalf, they empower us to trust our intuition. If they tease or ridicule us, we learn quickly that we are, at the very least, alone in dealing with danger. The most common response is denial, and it’s the most destructive.

Denial negates not only the intuition of the child but denies the child’s right to an identity. Sexual abuse continues within families throughout generations because of denial. We use denial to gaslight our children and ourselves into over-riding the single most important survival mechanism we have—our intuition. In “The Gift of Fear,” security specialist Gavin de Becker, who survived a horrible childhood, repeatedly stresses the importance of intuition in avoiding violence as an adult.

Our intuition has always been to tell someone when we’ve been violated, and to believe they will help us. Too often, however, we encounter denial. What we are finally seeing in our culture is the united voices of survivors shouting over the rote banalities of denial—and being heard! We are finally being heard, by one another, and by others who want to believe in the better angels of our nature and can no longer ignore the shouting.

It took more than 150 women to bring down Larry Nassar. It took just one voice to start the chorus. Every person who speaks out makes it less difficult for the next, and so on. Now, more men are starting to feel safe enough to talk about their own childhood sexual abuse. Many men are denied their truth by a culture that labels them “lucky” enough to be introduced to their “manhood” early.

“Transparent” character Josh Pfefferman is a good example. Josh was statutorily raped by an adult female babysitter when he was a young teen. His entire family remained in denial even when the grown child of their illicit union joined them for dinner. The character is said to have “troubled relationships with women,” as if the two are somehow unrelated.

Nothing that I know is more healing than naming the truth. I say this after decades of meditation, mindfulness practice, yoga, fitness of every sort, journaling hundreds of pages and leaning into work as if my life depended on it, which it did. There are frenetic decades of “doing” to remove oneself from the original experience. The body will carry its own violation for decades before presenting a bill.

Some will die with the secret. Others will live with the truth, and it will set them free. New neural pathways will slowly override those created by trauma, so that even an incest survivor can feel safe.

This is About Boundaries

I feel an obligation to check in here, which is good because I would otherwise be basking in absolute enjoyment of life. That is how I have felt for the last few days, having taken a difficult action to establish a necessary boundary—something incest and childhood abuse survivors are not wired for. We are devoted to, and protective of, those who abuse us because they were literally all we had. They count on this trauma bondage to outlive life.

Breaking free involves learning to establish boundaries in the wake of having them violated again and again by those we were supposed to be able to trust with our well-being, and who failed us. Families are the most fraught place to establish boundaries even in the best of circumstances and toxic quicksand in the worst. Family ties are frequently twisted in weird and difficult ways. We get trapped in the unresolved traumas of those before us.

Healing from trauma is not a single passage, but many passages along an intuitive path from victim to survivor. No one else can truly direct our healing, but compassionate witnesses and a conducive environment are critical. I currently have both for which I am deeply grateful, and I am in no hurry venture far beyond either, hence my continued boundary of relative anonymity.

We’ll call this Day No. 27 of recovery. Strength of body and mind began to return once I named my trauma. Once I started writing and saying, “I am an incest survivor,” even quietly here or out loud to myself, on my own. The mere act of being able to say those words lifted a large, heavy, black cloud from my life. The cost of carrying the shame of others is illness, depression, physical pain and too often our lives.

It was me or that burden. I chose to live. I do so each day. I must consciously act on my own behalf every day. I must protect the child I was from those who would further exploit her. I learned as painfully as most survivors do that health-care and legal professionals will often fail them and can sometimes do grave injury, like a surgeon slicing someone open and then handing them a bill to be sewed up. Even well-meaning folks can make the most ignorant statements or conjure the most egregious and discredited theories. It takes a survivor to know a survivor and all that it means to be one. We must be the ones who lead one another out from beneath the dark cloud of silence and pain.

Incest survivors share a lot with sexual trauma and physical abuse survivors. The sanctity of our very bodies has been violated, from the Latin, violare, “treated violently.” But incest survivors are unique in the bond we have with our violators and we are gaslighted into believing we must protect them and the family that did not protect us and may never do so. In almost every sense of the word, we have to learn how to care for ourselves. We were not taught properly, but in contradiction to our own well-being.

For me, right now, there is a great healing in quiet activity and meditation, reading, listening to music, doing yoga, hiking and taking care of the partner who is truly taking care of me and helping me learn to be cared for. I know well my good fortune in this circumstance. I worked very hard to create it.

Healing is not a gift, as Marilyn van Durbur reminds us. It is not. It is a practice.

Why now?

I will call this day 17 of my recovery as an incest survivor. I have spoken of it before. I have written about it before, in the context of a “first” sexual experience. That was more than 20 years ago. No one was capable of having the conversation, except for one other individual whom I was told by my editor at The Daily Nebraskan to interview as a first “female” sheriff in Nebraska. When I asked her what the most under-reported crime was in the state, without hesitation, she replied, “incest.” I don’t recall asking her how that could possibly be. I already knew that to speak out was to be humiliated, derided and blamed.

I knew that human beings find endless creative ways to victimize the less powerful. I knew people who twisted and perverted what the Christian bible informed me was responsibility for others and stewardship over Creation, not some bleak sickness justifying the torture and torment of other living things. These were, to me, the very people Jesus warned of. Sick, perverted, sad, blackened things, flailing blindly in darkness and harming everything in their path.

I knew this of human beings when I was a child. I saw sad sickness hiding in secrecy and darkness. To not speak of this plague is to give oneself over to darkness, yet to speak of it is to risk being shunned, slandered and shamed. How can this possibly be? How can we continue to enable something that brings so much costly harm to our species?

I believe we cannot, and that is “why now.”

The body never, ever forgets. It will never forget, as Marilyn van Derbur reminds us, even one time. The flood of cortisol etches grooves into the brain, the resilience of which rival years of practice on an instrument, or almost any less harmful activity. The more it is repeated, the deeper the wound and the more tragic the effect, which quite often includes death by suicide or long-term self-destructive behavior, particularly substance abuse, including prescription drugs.

I guarantee this without hesitation—that unless we address the source of the pain running through our culture and our kind, we will never, ever move the needle on opioid addiction. No sort of implanted serotonin booster chip will bring an end to the perversions of power that leave nothing but damage in their wake.

I am angry. I am grateful. I have gone to monumental lengths to suppress the rage of a violated child. And it is quite clear to me that continuing to do so will destroy me.

I choose to live, and I hope the words I write here may help others choose to live. I write this in part because it is no easy course of action to find the treatment resources necessary for recovery. This is not just a quick confession, nor is talk therapy alone sufficient (even if you’re fortunate enough to find a competent therapist). It must be wholistic and simultaneous of mind and body, as well as a support community.

Thus, since I do not have all these things handy to me at this time, I write, and will continue to write, about finding what is necessary heal, and raging at the assumptions, behaviors and complicity that allowed the existence of an atmosphere in which even one person is shamed for violations perpetrated upon them by others.

This is a journey into light, for me and millions of others like me, taught to swallow shame like poison and feel guilty about the resulting sickness.

Light is the only antidote.

Silence is deadly

People who read this may think I’ve gone off the deep end.
And that is OK. It’s about time.

They may say, “she is making this up for attention.”
And that is OK, although stupid.

They may shake their head in pity and say, “shame on her for embarrassing her family.”
And that is OK, because my family should be embarrassed, but I have nothing to be ashamed of. Anyone who ever made me feel as if I do should be ashamed of themselves.

The adults who judged me as a child acting out should be ashamed.

Anyone who ever shut down a conversation about inappropriate touching between children should hide their faces in shame right now!

Every person who ever blamed a victim because she is female should be exposed as a vestigial cave dweller left behind in the cognitive revolution.

Anyone who’s ever assumed “just one time” won’t hurt should be on an offender registry.

We should all be ashamed of the silence, and in being silent, that we have perpetuated one of the most wasteful of human potential and costliest behaviors that runs rampant through the populace like a plague, leaving in its wake severe depression; immuno, sleep and attachment disorders; lingering physical pain, paralysis, addiction and suicide.

When will we stop looking at these things as if they are the source of what’s causing them? When will we finally address human behavior as causation? Are we truly that baffled about an “opioid epidemic?” Are we really that dense about the epidemic of depression? These hurtful things are the price we pay to remain silent. We are so afraid of a simple and singular truth that we can’t even utter the sound of it.

I am an incest survivor. I am a child incest survivor.

I deserve to be heard.

I deserve to be helped.

I deserve to be respected.

I deserve to be recognized for surviving.

I deserve to be heeded.

I deserve to ignore the ignorant questions and remarks.

I deserve to not concern myself with anyone else’s discomfort.

I deserve an apology from every single human who’s ever used religion to justify harm to another, weaker human being. How dare you show your face?

I deserve to determine my own beliefs in the wake of all of my life experience, about which you know nothing.

I am an incest survivor, and that makes me stronger than you, unless you are an incest survivor, too. Then let me talk to you.

You were wronged. You were violated by someone who wronged you. They may have been weeks, months, years older. Mostly they were stronger, or you had just been beaten down into nothing already. What did it matter if you drank too much, took drugs or slept around? You were already “ruined” in the eyes of others, and so you let yourself believe it was true.

It’s not true. You deserved to be rescued. Right then and there—before it ever reached the point where the sanctity of your body was violated in any way, shape or form. You deserved to have an adult step in and protect you. You did not have that then, but you do, now. You have you, and you are far stronger than you can even begin to believe, because once you speak your truth, you’ll realize the weight of the shame you’ve been carrying for decades. Once you put it down, you will feel weightless. I am here to tell you this is true.

You are not alone. It was not your fault.
You are the victim of a crime.
Demand justice.

I am not ashamed

I am an incest survivor, and I am not sorry if that makes you uncomfortable. In fact, let me help you with that.

I AM AN INCEST SURVIVOR!!!

I am not sorry to say that I am an incest survivor. I am sorry—to me and every other incest survivor in the world who ever lived and who ever will—that I did not stand up and shout it sooner, every chance I had, to wake up the world to this wretched, nauseating nightmare.

I am an incest survivor. I am a child incest survivor. No one except for the army of child incest survivors could understand the lifelong legacy of depression, exhaustion, pain, emotional chaos, addiction and predatory experiences that go along with silence.

I am an incest survivor and I am proud to say “survivor,” because silence chases so many incested people to the grave, and they never live free of the burden of someone else’s shame and failure.

We know it hurts people, yet we leave victims on their own, justifying it on the grounds of family sanctity—a refuge for abusers. There’s always gossip, as well—like the new couple in town that are “really” brother and sister—or the sickness pervertedly romanticized in “Game of Thrones.” Somehow, in the midst of all this, coerced, systematic sexual contact from an older sibling or cousin is characterized as “kids being kids.”

No. That’s kids being predators, and adults not dealing with it, to the extent that we have children committing suicide from online bullying.

Bullies, in my experience, grow up to be bullies. They don’t know how to stop until something wakes up their humanity. But what in the name of heaven is going to finally wake us up? Acid attacks? A child pornography “industry?” How in the world is that even a thing? What is this strain of illness coursing through the human species and why aren’t we insisting unrelentingly that it be stopped, forever?

What further evidence do we need to know to be motivated to step up and stop this now? What exactly do we need to address the violence that begins within and around us as children?

I know that I am done. I am done being shamed, and being ashamed. The notion that I or someone like me ever was shamed is a deep corruption in collective human perception. Children are suffering—and becoming addictive, depressive, suicidal adults—right now, because we are not willing to wake up and acknowledge what children do to children. What relatives do to children. What we allow to happen to children, and what we then blame on them for the rest of their lives.

Shame on all of us for letting this continue another, single minute. If something I say here wakes up just one person, and they wake up one person, and so on down the line, perhaps the world can be immunized with awareness and moved to action.

Even now, a neighborhood in Perris, Calif., is waking up. The whole of Hollywood is waking up to what it’s done to Dylan Farrow. We have to wake up to the realities of children if we are ever to hope for a world of peace in which our own kind can be sustained. We must leave our simian ways behind.

I am an incest survivor, and I am not going away. I am not going to be quiet, and I am not going to give it a rest. Not anymore. I will not be a party to one more child being harmed because I could not be bothered.