I wrote this post for Mindpower about a year ago, during the time that I had Gabriel, and I had it posted on another blog. After re-reading it I have decided that with the New Year coming this is a perfect time to repost it.
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Child abuse is a HUGE issue in this country. One of the foundational premises of the abortion argument in the 1960's and '70's was that if we only gave birth to children we WANTED we wouldn't have abused children in the world. Well, that just hasn't happened, folks, and I am here to tell you that the premise is wrong. The whole argument makes no sense. As Mother Theresa says, if we can kill our children while they are the most defenseless and in the womb, what is to stop us from doing it after they are out of the womb and causing us aggravation? Those aren't her exact words but close enough.
I have had a lot of experience with abused children. Three of my adopted children were the worst abuse case that our county had ever seen to date in 1995. I live in a rural county. I do not live in the city that I was raised in during my childhood. I live in the village of a very small town (about 5000 people) made up mostly of farmers but including people of all various backgrounds and career choices. Most of the people in my county are low-middle to upper middle class. We do not have a high degree of people on welfare.
Yet, we STILL have children being physically, mentally, emotionally and sexually abused. It would shock you to know some of the families that these kids come from. Several years ago I was asked by the county to take three children under the age of five years old. Their last name was the same as a very prominent business in the next town. It turns out these were the grandchildren of the man and his wife who own the business. They are younger than my husband and me. I asked why they, as grandparents, did not take their children in to live with them. I was told "they don't have time".
Alrighty then.
That would explain to me what the number one problem with this society is becoming and why we are having the problems we are currently experiencing. I'll bet they didn't have time for their daughter when she was growing up either. I am up to HERE with that excuse. I HATE it. Children are US! Whether they are our own children, or someone else's child, they are not something that we can just turn away from and pretend doesn't exist. They are our future and they are the only thing we take to heaven with us. Everything else is rusting away. Somebody needs to get a revelation of this until it is too late. If we don't we are going to continue to see more and more problems with the future generations. Please don't turn your head and say that other people's children don't matter to you. They are the future of your own children's world.
Don't we have enough children coming to school with guns? Don't we have enough babies like Gabriel, with so much rage in their little, drug addicted bodies that they can't stop crying for hours on end until they finally find out that someone will take care of them who won't hit them and they will love them through their pain? Don't we have enough suffering in this world? Does anyone actually believe that killing off our own species in the womb is going to solve that problem?
Well, the point of this blog posting was really not to talk about abortion, Gabriel or foster care. It was to give you some of what I responded to Mindpower about which has to do with the rampant sexual abuse of children in this country.
Sexually abused children generally have certain behaviors that other children do not. This is not always true but it is many times true.
One such behavior is pooping one's pants.....on purpose, and at a much older age than the normal child. I knew a boy, and he wasn't even in foster care, who did this until he was in HIGH SCHOOL. I believe that it is a subconscious act on the part of the child to keep the abuser away from them. They may not even fully understand it themselves but if they can make themselves unattractive and "stinky" maybe the guy will leave them alone.
Cutting is another. That is probably the one thing that I really struggled with understanding the most. I could not figure out why people would cut themselves. Even after taking all kinds of training on the subject I just could never figure out WHY they would do such a thing to themselves. I've even had different foster children who have done that and I still didn't get it, even though I truly gave it a lot of thought and care. I prayed about it and the Lord really opened my eyes on it. Apparently the pain on the inside is so great that the cutting actually distracts from it and causes "the pain" to be on the outside. I knew that intellectually, but until the Lord Himself helped me to understand it made no sense to me. Now it does. That is usually done at a later age, however, and might not even start until after the abuse is over. It generally does not stop just because the abuse has stopped and it is a very hard behavior to control. For the person doing it and for the people who want to help the person doing it.
Eating disorders are not uncommon for a child of any kind of abuse. The reason for the disorder in an abused child is different than the reason an average child might have one, but it is always about having and maintaining control over one's own body. The average child who has eating disorders just wants to be thin and it spins out of control. In this type of child it is generally caused by a controlling mother (as opposed to an abusive father).
The abused child, however, just wants to control his or her own body, and have autonomy over it in the way that all people want that, and what more control can one have than what goes in one's mouth? There may also be a conscious or sub-conscious wish to die. Starving works for that, right? I was never abused, not in anyway or at anytime in my life, but I had eating disorders in an era where there wasn't even a name for them. I thought I invented it.
Generally a sexually abused person goes in one of three directions, and if one is looking for the symptoms they are not that hard to spot............
One, they HATE sex, everything to do with sex, the idea of sex, talk about sex, etc.
Two, they LOVE sex. They dress provocatively, they are promiscuous, they can't get enough. They have learned that, especially with men, even with boys who were abused by a male, they can get attention through sex and they play that card for all it is worth. They don't really want the sex as much as they just want someone to pay attention to them and they have learned that through sex they can get attention even if it's not really the type of attention they want.
Three, they may become gay. Of course that is not the only reason for being gay. Not at all. But that is a big one. The abused child will still have sexual feelings as they get older but they cannot seperate themselves from the distaste they carry toward the abuse they suffered and so they turn their sexual energy toward the gender of the one who did not abuse them. It's safer, right?
Another problem with being abused, and this is true in every type of abuse, is that the abused can become abusive themselves. This may happen seperately from the other two or it may happen in conjunction with them. And it can happen no matter which of the other two scenereos occur. The abused have a distorted view of life and love and they don't trust anyone.
If you ever read the book The Child called It do you remember the mom? Do you remember how she would be "normal" one minute and then just "go off" and become "like a different person"? He said her body language would shift, her eyes would change, her facial expressions would distort......that is the symptom, right there.
She was "possessed" by a demon and she did not know what to do about it. People talk about their "inner demons" but what they really fail to grasp is that demons are not THEM, they are spiritual principalities and powers of the air and unless we allow Christ in us to defeat these demons they will stay with us. The author, David Pelzer, doesn't explain this, which leads me to believe that he doesn't fully understand it himself, but as an intercessor in the Lord I see it very clearly. The reason the mom was this way is because she is what one would call "demon-possessed".
Lot's of people, even Christians don't believe in demon-possession anymore but that is a fatal mistake. Demons are alive and well in the world and the are wrecking havoc through people who have opened themselves up to them, even unknowingly. Ignorance of the law is no excuse as any policeman will tell you. Ignorance of God's Law will be no excuse either when you go before the Judge of the Ages.
This mother did not open herself up knowingly, but through the abuse that she suffered herself (and I am certain that she did suffer abuse) she took on the characteristics of the abuser, which includes his demons, that she so loathed.
THAT is exactly WHY it is soooo important for people to accept Jesus as their Savior and to make Him the Lord of their lives and to live for Him all the days of their lives. For them it is not just about whether they go to heaven or hell when they die. If they don't grab hold of Him, with all their mind, soul and strength, they run the risk of becoming exactly what they have hated.
Christ is our only deliverer. He delivers us not only from our own sin but from the generational curses that follow us from our forefathers. We all have these generational curses but for each family the curses are different. One family may harbor the skeleton of alchoholism and one may carry a "spirit of lust".
In my family I have had to battle intellectualism (which breeds an ungodly, humanistic mindset) and pride. Those may not seem so bad, especially compared with abuse, but remember that "God resists the proud" and "Pride goeth before a fall and a haughty spirit before destruction". Pride is considered one of the "deadly sins" and God HATES it. I grew up with people who thought they were better than other people. In some ways they were! My parents were faithful to each other all the years of their marriage and took care of us very well. We had the Leave it to Beaver life. Yet, we were not saved. Not one little bit. It is a deception of the enemy of our souls to believe that "good" people are going to heaven and "bad" people are going to hell. There will be many surprizes when the Judgment Day comes.
Even though my childhood was free of the type of abuse we are talking about, God actually hates that kind of pride just as much. He knows it is evil. The irony is that a little girl I grew up right next door to, even in my very well-to-do neighborhood, was sexually abused by her father and no one ever knew it back then. If we had known the signs to look for we might have seen it but people didn't talk about stuff like that back then and it was easy to pretend that it didn't exist. She suffered from drug abuse and mental illness all of her adult life and committed suicide several years ago at the age of 50. Such a waste of a beautiful life.
It is very important for us, as individuals and as part of our communities to step in and speak up when we see this kind of thing happening. It is not easy. I would never say it is. It is hard. People are hard. It is much easier to sit in front of inanimate computers and televisions and waste our lives with and on those. Dealing with people, especially hurting people, is one of the hardest things you will ever do. Yet, it is one of the most rewarding.
Remember......to whom much is given, much is expected. John Kennedy did not say that. Jesus said that. There are lot's of things that people think are just nice little 'cliches' that are actually verses from the Bible. It is better to give than to receive.
Give your life away........be a foster parent. Or love that little child who lives next door to you. Love a baby that you didn't give birth to as if you did. Don't use the excuse that you can't handle the pain of losing them. I am tired of hearing that. Life is pain. All of life involves pain. From the birth process through to death. Please let yourself feel, let yourself love, let yourself live for someone other than yourself. You will never regret it. I promise.
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