So,
I had a meeting recently (about a very top-secret project) and during it the
issue came up about service users feeling like they’ve experienced a miss
opportunity in reporting the abuse they’ve survived.
This
often happens immediately when you get involved with mental health services –
whether that be inpatient or outpatient/community – because the first contact
is usually in the form of some sort of assessment and that often includes the
question ‘have you ever been abused?’
For
the abuse survivor who has kept quiet, this is yet another opportunity where
they’ve not spoken up. Another time that they’ve been too scared to speak.
Another time that their abuser has won. When, in reality, if you’ve never
reported it before, why would you suddenly decide to? And secondly, if anyone
was going to be the first person to be told, is it realistic to assume that
person would be a complete stranger who coldly and clinically asks one of the
most important questions you’ll be asked in your mental health journey – in your
life?
But when you’re in that position, you don’t see all of the reasonable
motivations behind your ‘no’ – just the fact that you’ve done the wrong thing
again. Because even when you’ve got all the reasons in the world not to report
the abuse, there’s a part of you that knows it’s wrong to do that. It’s wrong
to keep quiet. As soon as you recognize that what the abuser did was a crime, there’ll
always be a part of you who knows that the right thing to do is to report it. It’ll
probably feel like the tiniest part – in fact, you might not even know that it’s
there – but I promise it is.
Recognizing
that I should report the abuse I experienced was difficult because it made me
feel even worse of a person for knowing I should do it but still not doing it. As
much as what he’d done was wrong, was I now in the wrong? Was my failure to
report the abuse a crime too? Was it bad? Was I a bad person? Maybe I was;
maybe he was right, and I was a bad person who deserved it all. But recognizing
what he’d done was a crime was my ticket out of that though process; I knew now
that I hadn’t deserved it. Because no one – no matter who they are - deserves
to have a crime – no matter what it is – happen to them!
The
professional I was meeting with, talked about how essential this question is in
the assessment process when someone first comes to the attention of services;
it’s a question that needs to be asked to understand a person’s behavior,
attitude, opinion and thoughts. I completely understand this because when I
first attempted suicide, no one knew what had happened to me and no one knew I’d
been hearing voices for the past ten days, so the overdose came as a huge shock
to everyone. I remember the Psychiatrist who assessed me in A&E saying, “if
you’d just tell me why you did it then you might not have to stay in Hospital.”
Which, thought, meant ‘if you tell me you were abused, I won’t section you.’
Without even understanding what a section was at that point, I was faced with one
of the biggest, and probably most common ‘threats’ in psychiatry. It’s that
whole thing about how talking will make you better. And if you don’t open up
then you won’t improve. If you don’t tell them about the abuse, then the voices
in your head will just get louder. If you refuse to talk about your trauma then
you’re still going to want to self-harm. You’ll still want to be dead. And it’s
about that fear that ‘what if I do what they say, and it doesn’t work?’ ‘What
if I finally tell them about the abuse and I still want to kill myself?’ The
worry is that you’ll have made yourself vulnerable for no reason. That you won’t
gain anything. Because it was a risk. And not the guarantee they made it sound
like. I think that being told it’s a risk – actually being told all of the
information - and that you may not feel better after reporting the abuse, and
you may still want to hurt yourself, will allow people the opportunity to make
an informed decision as to whether to talk about it or not. In talking about
the time in your life when you were at your most vulnerable, you’re – almost –
voluntarily opening yourself up to that vulnerability again. You need to feel
like you’re in control; you know all of the risks in talking, you know what
will happen, what might happen, what could happen, and you know the results of
all of these maybes. But can you really predict such a thing?
On
the day I first told someone about the abuse, I didn’t know I was going to do
it. I hadn’t woken up and made the conscious decision that I wouldn’t talk
about it but neither did I find myself in the middle of the conversation with a
fellow inpatient in the psychiatric hospital trying to decide whether to tell her
or not. After over two years of it seeming like the biggest decision in the
world; it almost became no decision at all. Like I just knew that now was the
right time and she was the right person. Which, I think, is another worry on an
abuse survivors mind; how do I know who to talk to? What if telling that person
changes our relationship? What if this person says the wrong thing? What if I
scare them off from loving me? All I can say is, it’s kind of like; you know
when you know. While, of course, I promote people reporting abuse as soon as
possible, I massively promote them reporting it when they are ready, and to the
person they would most like to. A forced report to the Police in a cold,
clinical, formal room isn’t right for some people. For others, they want it to
be so removed and uncomfortable from their everyday life that it is exactly the
right situation for them. Everyone is different. People find reassurance in
different places, from different things, and with different people.
Reporting
my abuse over two years after it’d occurred, I knew it meant there’d be no
physical evidence to prove my report. I knew that from the offset, but it still
scared me to think about; I mean, how the hell was I going to prove it had
happened?! Strangely enough, I feel like I know my abuser even better the
longer it’s been since the abuse because when I reported it, I still held quite
a lot of hope that maybe he’d admit to. That they’d arrest him in his place of
work, he’d be embarrassed and upset and would finally cave and tell the Police
everything. Now? Now I can’t believe what I was thinking. But have I changed my
thoughts because now I’ve seen he hasn’t confessed? No; I could still hold that
hope that one day he will. But I don’t. It’s hard to explain the assurance and
confidence I have that I know him well enough to be sure he won’t.
But perhaps other abuse
survivors will know what I mean…?