We are all victims.

For most of us growing up caused a trauma. Either we were born during wars, dictatorships or military rule, in an oppressive society, with a despotic father, a cruel mother, in an intolerant religious family or in an institution. We were abandoned, abused, bullied or just not noticed. 

Few people I know talk about a happy childhood without family drama. Way back, I saw an elementary school friend’s back covered with criss crossing cuts and scars left by her fathers whip. Heard first hand chilling accounts of mothers beating their daughters viciously and severely, and of a father going to bedroom of the two elder sisters for years while the rest of the family listened. I am sure that many others of my friends have stories of abuse but don’t want to tell them. Now that our parents are old or dead, some start talking. 

Is it true that the abuser was abused? Will the kids of Nazis will be Nazis? Will beaten kids beat? Sexual abused kids will sexually abuse? Authoritarians breed authoritarians? Oppressed oppress? I am sure not! 

Are we all victims of an abuser who was a victim of an abuser? Believe me that I don’t mean this as an excuse. There is no excuse for any abuse. This has gone on too long, for centuries, forever. How can we break this perpetual cycle of abuse?

I was the first child in my class to live with a divorced mother. I was the odd one out and pitied by others, because I didn’t live with my father and only saw him on vacations. It worked out, I must say, because it would have been way worse living with him or better under him (more about my father here). When her second daughter died a few days after birth (I was three), my mother was shattered. She fell into depression and the impossible relationship to my father got even more impossible, destroying her dreams of a large family. It was a dark time for my mom and little Katja. 

I learned to adapt, like most of us do either happily or forced, we make do as children with what we get. I hung out with other families whenever and wherever I could, spent as much time as possible at friends houses and on sleep overs. On vacations, I adopted myself right away into families with several children and spent my time with them instead with my own family. In many ways I learned a new skill. I became outgoing and a people person. Like many of us who work at overcoming a difficult childhood, I learned to accept it and to appreciate my coping mechanisms as strengths. I learned with help, it took years, to accept and create real companionships.

Some of us are not that lucky. Their trauma is so severe and the wall they had to build is so robust, that it prevents healing. They live with a time bomb inside them, which can be triggered anytime. They never really feel safe or grounded, scratching by on the blanket of denial. Others act out. They yell it out, yell out the hurt inflicted on them. They don’t repress, they express. Our society doesn’t allow this behavior, normally, but some victims find ways to channel their anger into art or music, or find places and communities where expressiveness is accepted. 

The recent German movie ‘System Crasher’, hailed at the Berlin Film Festival and Germanys entry for the Foreign Film Oscar 2020 link, portrays the world an abused and abandoned nine-year old girl experiences. She ping-pongs between foster care and psychiatric institutions, where she gets sent to to cool off when her violent outbreaks make her intolerable. Even the professionals surrounding her aren’t able to help. And her mother won’t take her back. Dumped, with paralyzing anger and unable to find someone willing or capable of giving her a real home, she keeps on spinning out of control. It gets worse and worse. There is no hope. Kids like her hardly ever socialize in a way that allows them to live their lives in the midst of society. Most end up on welfare or in prisons. 

My mother worked in several homes for ‘difficult children’ and saw there desperate situations. The children mostly came from abusive households, one child had been thrown out of a window by a parent. Unspeakable.

Around the same time in 1979, a teenager in Hamburg shot his parents to end a childhood of mental cruelty. We were stunned. A victim had changed sides. Such acts of self-justice were unheard back then. A parent murder was more taboo than child abuse.

Even without trauma, fitting in needs to be learned, as some psychologists argue, parents need to socialize children by the time they are four years old, because kids already experience in kinder-garden if they fit in or not. Learning to fit in later in life is possible but difficult, they think. And even then, fitting in is no warranty for happiness or living life fully. 

How do people live with the trauma? Is there a way to heal? Do therapies work? Sometimes we get to confront our abuser, which I imagine to be therapeutic. Sometimes we have to get closure without that. 

With #metoo in 2017, predators and abusers were accused. It grew into a movement through daily accounts of victimization and gained even more momentum once the abusers were dragged into the limelight. 

The outcasts, alienated, occupied, marginalized were taking a stand and described their pain, the door was kicked wide open. Skeletons hiding in closets were being dragged out into the open. That permanently turned public opinion. The public started to emphasize with the victims. For decades, the abuser controlled the public dialogue and rape victims were accused of having provoked the assault. ‘The Accused’, a 1988 movie starring Jody Foster, stirred the pot about pushing the blame onto sexual assault victims link and shocked with a graphic rape scene.

There was no justice back then for the abused. Sexist judges and prosecutors shielded predators. But that is no more. Most recently, the US watched the very public case of the pedophile rapist Jeffrey Epstein, who avoided persecution for decades. The ‘Club’ existed or how else was it possible that this billionaire abuser was safe from persecution for decades and now was able to kill himself in prison? I think, the suicide was faked and that he lives with a new face and identity somewhere in South America. All with a little help from friends in high places.

A decade ago, after years of denial or deafening silence, the Catholic Church finally gave up protecting the thousands of priests, who had sexually abused children in parishes worldwide. For many victims it had taken very long to garner the guts to accuse their clerical abusers. The church is now paying reparations into the millions to the victims, bringing some of the implicated parishes to bankruptcy.

The bastions of white male supremacy are finally starting to crumble. White males are accused of being aggressors and enabling or condoning them. They are made aware, that their privilege and entitlement make them guilty by association. So much so, that they are crying out, that they are now being victimized and that it’s hard to be a while male. 

The world and its power structures are changing. We are still light years from a just and compassionate society, but I hope, that eventually we will be able to break the vicious cycle of abuse.

*title pix is from the movie poster for ‘System Crasher’ with Helena Zengel. Photo credit: Port au Prince Pictures.