She was her cousins’ puppet
ONE cannot tell just by looking, the pain 35-year-old *Beatrice has been through.
But when she speaks, it’s a story of years of pain, hurt and abuse by her male cousins, that started when she was nine years old.
Beatrice was the one six of her family members turned to whenever they wanted to have sex, a situation that has been so devastating to her that she tried twice to end her life.
It started, she said, when she was nine years old, and ended when she was 23.
She explained that she was living with her grandmother in Spanish Town, when her 17-year-old cousin visited. Her grandmother asked him to accompany Beatrice to the shop.
On their way, they stopped at a playground. While on a swing, he came over to her and started touching her intimately. She said before she realised what was happening, he stole her childhood.
“I was bleeding and crying and I was saying ‘stop’… but he never paid me any mind,” Beatrice told All Woman last week. “I went home and I went to the bathroom and cleaned myself up.”
But, she said, she didn’t report the matter to her grandmother because she was afraid she would be branded a liar. Today she’s telling her story, as she said she wants release from the demons that have haunted her all her life.
“Living with this is hurtful; there are too many families in Jamaica going through this without saying anything,” she said. “I am tired of sitting down with it in my stomach with fear and just hoping that I will forget it.”
The cousin’s molestation continued and after some months went by, another cousin came to visit and he too decided to join in the abuse.
“This one now, if I say no he would beat me up,” she explained. Her reprieve was that neither of them lived at the house. However, most weekends they would visit and whenever they did, she would be forced to accommodate them.
“I can’t tell you how it happened. I can’t tell you why. All I know is I remember one time specifically when I was about 12, I went to visit my aunt in Kitson Town and this cousin was there touching me, touching me. And I remember that I was coming out of a sweetsop tree and because I wouldn’t allow him to, he pushed me out of the tree and my hand got sprained. And when I got home I didn’t know what to tell my grandmother.
“Each time they come, they would have sex with me,” she said as her voice broke. “Sometimes they would come every week or every two weeks and I had to do it.”
Beatrice explained that she was living with her grandmother because her mother and father had separated as a result of her father physically abusing her mother.
She said her six male cousins who molested her were all from her father’s side of family.
She also knows of three other female cousins who were also molested.
“You know when it would be bad? When we had family reunions. Because we had family reunions on a regular basis and it would just be bad!” she recalled.
She said one of her reasons for not telling could be the fact that she wanted to be accepted in the family and her need to be treated as well as her other cousins were.
“I wanted to be loved,” she said. “Up until this moment, I still want that. I wanted to feel that sense of belonging, like I was really valued. But one of the main reasons that I didn’t tell was because I did not want to be told I was a liar. I really didn’t want that. I think I was afraid of that more than anything else.”
She said as a child she was blamed for a lot of things that went wrong and so she felt she would have been blamed for these acts.
“I think my grandmother would have believed them more than she would me.”
At 17, Beatrice’s grandmother died and she was left at the house alone. Shortly afterwards she had to leave, as an uncle came and claimed rights to the property. As fate would have it, she had to move in with one of her aunts, the mother of one of her abusers, in a house with 11 other people — including her aunt’s seven children and three grandchildren.
“This auntie had three sons; I was abused by two. The third made an attempt but was not successful,” she said.
“Now that I was living there, I had to sleep on the same bed with one of them, so night after night I was exposed. She said the abuse happened in the bed she shared with the male cousin, while on another bed in the same room was the other cousin, who was not successful in molesting her, and his girlfriend.
The cousin she shared a bed with was an adult and became the third cousin to molest her. She was then 19, and also in a steady relationship with another man.
Soon her cousin’s girlfriend told her that she had witnessed their actions and reported them. Word soon spread. Family members began cursing Beatrice while calling the girlfriend a liar.
At this point, Beatrice found out that she was pregnant. She was unsure whether the child was her boyfriend’s or her cousin’s. Today she is still unsure.
“I told my son what happened and I told him I am not sure who his father is and it drove a wedge between us,” she said.
She said her then boyfriend has accepted responsibility for the child, telling Beatrice he did so because he was “sorry for her”. He too knew of her past.
When her son was two, Beatrice left for England to seek a new life. However, she said she met another cousin who again started molesting her. He became the fourth. She was then 20, and the abuse lasted three years.
“This one wanted a relationship because he said ‘oh the royal family does it so we can do it’. And even when I begged him to stop he never did,” she said.
She said the worst thing about this was that her aunt walked in one day while they were having sex and she did nothing.
“She walked in and she was like ‘Oh! Sorry!’ and closed the door,” Beatrice said.
She said she tried dealing with everything by writing letters and posting notes in her diary. However, it was only after the cousin’s girlfriend found out and confronted Beatrice that it ended.
She said her aunt made mention of the incident only once. This was one day while they were both watching a programme on Jerry Springer featuring cousins who were sexually involved. Beatrice said this was when her aunt blurted out, ‘See, everywhere you go cousin and cousin doing it’.
“I just started crying — no, bawling!” she said.
She said by now everybody in the family knew what was happening but no one was saying or doing anything about it.
Overall, she ended up being molested by six cousins, four repeatedly and two once each.
“I was just something that they could come and have sex with,” she said sadly. “I just didn’t want to live because nobody cared. Nobody really saw me.”
Her first suicide attempt was at age 12. She took three bottles of her grandmother’s pills, went under a tree and swallowed them. However, a neighbour saw her and though Beatrice cannot recall exactly what took place, she remembered waking up to find the woman sticking her finger down her throat to make her throw up. When the woman asked what was wrong, Beatrice told her that she missed her mother.
Her second attempt at suicide was while she was in England. She tied a rubber glove around her throat and lay down in a bath full of water in an attempt to drown herself. This time a female cousin walked in, pulled her out and asked, ‘When you kill yourself what is going to happen to [her son]?’
Beatrice said since then she has had thoughts of suicide but has used the love for her son to keep her going.
“Now I am at a better place and I am more in love with my son than I have ever been with myself,” she said. But one of the worst parts of her suffering, she said, is the fact that her son is now rebelling because of what happened. This she said could be due to him feeling she is trying to cast doubt on the only father he has ever known.
Beatrice said she feels the need to have a DNA test done just to clear the air and get the truth out for everyone’s sake, especially her son’s.
Today, she steers clear of her cousins, none of whom have apologised. She even feels that given the opportunity, they would do it all over again.
With tears in her eyes, Beatrice said it was only three weeks ago that her 27-year-old half brother attempted to have sex with her.
She recalled visiting her mother who lives a short distance from her and being accompanied home in the wee hours of the night by her brother. After deciding to spend the night with her, and lying down on her bed chatting, he began touching her. When she asked him what he was doing, he begged her to accommodate him, “for just five minutes”. She said she then asked him to leave and has not spoken to him since.
Beatrice said she has seen the same thing happen to lots of young girls.
“If it’s not by their cousins, it’s by their brothers, or stepfathers or uncles or fathers. Right now I find it hard to move on with my life. I am 35 years old and find it hard to live with someone and there is this emptiness inside that I cannot describe. I just wish these people who do these things would stop and think before they make a move on a child or a young girl.” she said.
*Name changed
Psychologist: After a while you don’t believe in yourself anymore
DR Michele Lewin, clinical psychologist at the Oxford Medical Centre, said after the initial stages of sexual molestation, persons like Beatrice would begin to lose their self worth as the molestation begins to shape their lives.
“After a while you don’t believe in yourself anymore,” Dr Lewin explained. “You don’t believe much of yourself anymore. You start to believe what others think of you. I guess for her there was nobody else to give her an alternative self-worth and so she would start to believe what the primary caregivers told her from before, probably not verbally but by their behaviour. And so she loses self worth.”
And while some persons may wonder why with age, and the passage of time, Beatrice didn’t put a stop to her abuse, Dr Lewin said she should in no way be blamed for what happened to her, as by adulthood the abuse would have become a part of her, while her need for acceptance was great.
“She is a victim. You cannot blame a victim,” the psychologist said. “That need for acceptance is so great that you would do anything. You don’t know anything different so you would still hang on to what you know than what you don’t know. To go for something you don’t know, you would already have to be aware of its existence. She still feels worthless. And even at 35 — even if this is a career person — that sense of worthlessness is still deep within her. So even if she should leave that whole setting and achieve something in life, it will still be there unless she gets professional help to help her get past her past. I would expect her to have a lot of issues in her relationships. She definitely needs help,” Dr Lewin said “She cannot escape her past unless she gets help.”
She said sexual molestation is one of the most traumatic experiences that a child could ever go through, moreso if the child is in an environment where there are people who are supposed to raise and validate that child.
This, she said, can force a child to grow up not learning how to trust his/her own instincts and therefore find him/herself in situations where they are constantly vulnerable to such acts. This, she said was the situation with Beatrice.
“It can lead the child not to learn to trust their own instinct nor themselves anymore,” she said. “They can’t trust their emotions, they can’t do so because persons in that environment did not teach them how to do that.”
The psychologist advised anyone who has had a childhood invalidating experience like molestation to seek professional help.
