Photo: By Caleb Woods on Unsplash.
Aid memoir, part two: Anne Wade looks for the roots of war in childhood
‘What makes lovely little children become violent?’
What makes lovely little children become violent as they grow up? I do know that Adolf Hitler, and his successor as European invader, Vladimir Putin, were treated appallingly as children – as were my parents, and their parents before them. The Old Testament seems grossly unfair when it visits on children the iniquity of their fathers, but perhaps that was not so much a divine threat as an observation of what happens if societies do not unite to intervene where necessary – for instance to curb a father, or a leader, who exploits their power over their family, or people. Could the Peace Testimony and psychotherapy work together to help us with this?
Adolescence gives us a second chance to repair things that have gone awry in the first five years of life. The hormones of puberty reorganise the brain in a way reminiscent of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. At Leigh House, the Quaker-led adolescent psychotherapeutic unit I once worked at, I learned something about breaking the cycle of abuse and deprivation, healing neglect, violence and mischance, and helping young people in their distress, so they might grow into constructive, loving people.
I was already involved in campaigns against child abuse. At the time the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) was only addressing child neglect. We were successful in getting baby battering (now subsumed under non-accidental injury) accepted as a reality, only to have the concept applied too widely, leading to some false accusations. We also got the physical punishment of children banned in schools – but not at home; that’s a job that needs finishing.
I once wrote a series of articles for the Friend on child protection. When I pointed out that the Peace Testimony included children, I received some incensed letters from Friends who told me it was ridiculous to think you could raise children without physical chastisement. There is still a defence of ‘reasonable punishment’ in England, though not in Scotland or Wales. There was little conscious awareness of emotional abuse such as coercive control and humiliation.
My main concern was child sexual abuse. But as late as 1989 the NSPCC wrote to me, ‘We deal with real child abuse – neglect and physical abuse. We do not waste time on middle class sexual fantasies.’ But I knew that girls had started overdosing on aspirin in the mid 1950s, as a mute appeal for help against child sexual abuse, while society denied that such abuse even existed. I recognised these abused girls, from my own experience, when they were admitted to hospital. They wanted to disclose the abuse but they did not have the words. I developed a simple way of working with them using psychodrama, based on the way I had found to stand up against my own father.
The girls needed help to acquire the language to articulate and understand what had been done to them, while the experience was still fresh. They needed to be well heard, to have a witness to their pain, and to be believed. There were big mirrors in most bathrooms, and I encouraged them to watch themselves as they imagined standing up to their abuser. I would get them to visualise themselves expressing their anger over and over again at their abuser, as violently as they wanted, maybe stabbing and cutting him into tiny fragments and throwing them into the wind. Sometimes we would need to keep the volume low, and act it all out in whispers and mime, but that only intensified the drama. They needed to be told, over and over again, that it was not their fault, and that they were right to be enraged. If they were not given an opportunity to externalise the trauma, they would internalise it, burying it deep, so it remained like an abscess in their psyche.
‘The girls needed to be well heard, to have a witness to their pain, and to be believed.’
Then we would talk about how to moderate their anger into a useful tool, and how to assert themselves in ways that would be both safe and effective in stopping their abuser in the future, without acting violently and unlawfully themselves. Despite the limitations of a hospital ward, which also provided the security to keep them safe, this technique was effective. The girls would express enormous anger against the abuser, and would often find the energy and courage to stop the abuse when they went home. I got letters from some of them later. Some were too afraid of being murdered.
I never found it difficult to get the girls to differentiate between their entitlement to express their anger at what had been done to them, and their responsibility not to retaliate blindly against other people, or pass the abuse on in any way. And early intervention produced dramatically more effective results compared with working with abused women, for instance, who find it difficult to change.
Lotte Rosenberg and Bill Allchin, the Jungian analysts who led Leigh House, were ahead of their time in acknowledging the reality of child sexual abuse. When a group of our young people came to Bill and told him that a new member of staff had molested them, Bill asked if they would repeat this in front of the member of staff. They did, and the man admitted it. It was reported and, as the kids kept telling each other, ‘he was down the drive before the morning was out’. They were amazed that anyone had taken their complaints so seriously, which was indeed unusual for that time.
But despite being so far ahead of most practitioners, Lotte only went so far, insisting that once a stop was put to abuse, the case was closed and you just put it behind you, with no great harm done. Lotte said impatiently to me, ‘There comes a time when we have to let go of our complaints against our parents and get on with life’. Towards a Quaker View of Sex, so good on the equality of same sex relationships, was therefore dismissive of the long term effects of sexual abuse, because the group compiling the book saw her as the expert.
What I offered these sexually abused girls was only ever first aid. All the survivors I knew disagreed with Towards a Quaker View of Sex: we needed deeper healing before we could let the hurt go. Meanwhile the abuse continued to damage all areas of our lives, and this rejection of our reality was re-traumatising and intensely distressing.
Why did we continue to feel so bad even after putting a stop to the abuse? A lot of women were asking this question, but no one had any answers. Effective psychotherapy for the long term effects of child sexual abuse did not yet exist. Post-traumatic stress disorder, (PTSD) had not yet been named, beyond the ‘shell shock’ of the first world war. What is not named cannot exist clearly in consciousness, and therefore cannot be talked through and healed. The lack of naming can cause secondary trauma, physical and mental illness, and unhealthy behaviour later.
Survivors were also emotionally deprived. They were suffering from the loss of the non-exploitative, unconditional love that should exist between a girl and her parents, who should set aside their own needs and prioritise hers. I had begun to work on that in my training, but it was a maze I had still not fully negotiated. We call it emotional deprivation, but naming it is only a first step. In reality it is a vast, unbridgeable chasm in the centre of our lives, interfering with everything we try to do.
We could fight for others, but we had not yet healed enough to fight for ourselves. I knew what we needed, but how could we bring it into being? What did our Quaker Meetings have to offer, when many Quakers believed the Society to be immune to such behaviour?
