TRIGGER WARNING. I watch child pornography to prosecute sex crimes. The kids’ silence is deafening.

[brer cat]

This is a painful subject, but the author makes important points that we need to understand. I also wonder if the silent suffering carries over into adulthood...if adult victims of abuse who were also abused as children are more likely to mask their pain, leading us to believe that they are not hurting.

... in video after video, I witnessed silent suffering. I later learned that this is a typical reaction of young sexual abuse victims. Psychiatrists say the silence conveys their sense of helplessness, which also manifests in their reluctance to report the incidents and their tendency to accommodate their abusers. If children do disclose their abuse, their reports are often ambivalent, sometimes followed by a complete retraction and a return to silence.

snip

We think silence can’t indicate that something hurts. Without an expression of pain, we assume there’s no injury. The pain scale at the doctor’s office displays a smiling face over a zero to represent no pain, while the worst pain, a “10,” is represented by a face crumpled in agony and tears falling. Too often, our society implicitly uses this scale to judge abused children’s emotional pain. If they’re not crying, if their faces are expressionless, we assume they must not be hurting. We refuse to hear silence as anything but a vacuum of feeling, a void in experience.

But in reality, a voiceless cry is often the most powerful one. Even though I encountered silence on many of the videos recorded by abusers, I decided that I would leave the sound on. Shielding my ears from the horrific acts done to these children would mute their pain and diminish my ability to give them a voice. One girl didn’t scream because her brother threatened to kill her. Another didn’t say anything because her father told her to keep it a secret. Regardless of what prompted it, the silence is deafening. It makes audible the psychological hold an abuser has over a child. Silence can be the most devastating evidence of sexual abuse; it can be the sound of pain itself.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/23/how-society-silences-sexually-abused-children/

[trumad]

1. Heartbreaking---absolutely Heartbreaking.

The abusers literally ruin the soul of the innocents---sometimes completely and forever.

I'm in the school that think abusers, no matter how ill they are, should be locked up for a very very long time.

[brer cat]

2. Abuse is always more than physical.

"ruin the soul" is sadly fitting. The author speaks of their dead eyes which is the view we have of their souls.

[smirkymonkey]

3. Horrible. So sad.

[nolabear]

4. When unable to escape, children often dissociate.

There's no one making noise because there's no one there to make it. There are of course degrees of dissociation and things can improve, but in severe, inescapable circumstances it can indeed be eerily silent.

[artislife]

5. It is like when an animal freezes

People think there is just two responses: fight or flight.

But then there is the frozen one.

I know.

[brer cat]

9. ...

[prayin4rain]

6. So awfully sad. n/t

[Solly Mack]

7. ...

[Lizzie Poppet]

8. This is where my opposition to capital punishment wavers.

Wavers but doesn't break: I'm still against the death penalty. But damn if I don't wish a bad end on people who victimize children. People who abuse the weak abandon at least a portion of their humanity.