When Girls Don't Tell

Table of Contents
Chapter One “Snakes in the Projects”…Page 6
Chapter Two “From the Projects to the Pit” ….Page 34
Chapter Three “My Identity Crises” …Page 43
Chapter Four “Windy City School Daze” …Page 62
Chapter Five “The Flypaper Factor” …Page 89
Chapter Six “Recovery of Sight to the Blind” …Page 126
Appendix I Suggestions About Solutions …Page 148
Appendix II Resources…Page 157
Appendix III References …Page 158


EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK
As I sat on the sofa at the foot of my childhood play sister, I felt a deep sadness. A plaid, fringed blanket draped her thin frame unable to hide the severity of her bony limbs. While her skin was still much of the dark smooth texture that I remembered, her eyes were worn and tired. Dierdra was sharing how she was happy that she found a purpose in the midst of her tragedy. Although she was deteriorating from the effects of HIV/AIDS, she had taken pleasure in speaking to other young people about why they should avoid the same lifestyle that resulted in her contracting the deadly virus.

I listened as she told me about how her downward spiral actually began with the same man that I blamed for my own tormented existence. As Dierdre talked I wondered how different our lives would have been if 15 years ago, one of us would have been able to tell someone what was happening to us. We were the same age but her sickness and maybe her lifestyle made her seem a bit older than me.

I wished that I had told my mother or Dierdre’s mother about their common law husband after I met my then nine year old “play sister.” I wished that she had told me or that I had told her that our step father liked to do nasty things to little girls. I looked at her and thought, this is what happens when girls are too ashamed or scared to tell about the bad things that people do to them.

The notorious Jane Adams Chicago housing projects are the backdrop for my earliest memories of family life. There were so many diverse families in the prison-like community that we called home. I remember that in the Medil grade school there was a family in which almost all of the members had gone blind. The girl who I had befriended explained to me that they had all watched an eclipse together which scorched their retinas. The year that I was to leave the projects, it appeared that most girls around my age had stories to tell about bad things that had happened to them.

By the age of seven I had accumulated my own bad stories. I had felt somehow singled out until I began to hear other disturbing details of rape and incest that was occurring on a regular basis. We did not call it rape but used terms such as “doing it” to describe when a boy or man would sexually impose his will on a girl. The type of violation that happened most often occurred between young girls and older boys. But my own projects experience ran the gamut beginning with an adult male to an adolescent boy who caught me in the shadows of the projects stairwells.

Something happens to a child who has been robbed of sexual purity. For me it imposed a warped maturity into an existence of which I saw no hope for recovery. It is not a progressive or sequential maturing process that balances the experience with knowledge. It produces a haunting existence for which there is no preparation.

Being forcibly subjected to the passion of another without understanding or inviting the engagement is very difficult to process. While it appeared to please the perpetrators, I knew that it was not a good experience. At the same time, I was not sure about what made it bad. The results of my encounters with child molestation occupied my thoughts without my having a reference point to process the images or the experience.

Note that I mentioned “perpetrators” and “encounters” because I was among the ones that the experts refer to as having experiences of “revictimization.” Revictimization is when someone suffers sexual abuse in separate multiple situations. Oprah Winfrey is one of the few women that I have ever heard publicly speak about being molested as a child along with her subsequent revictimization by various perpetrators.

As much as I can recall my own revictimization experiences totaled nine times with nine different perpetrators from the age of four until I was twenty two years old. This writing explores the effects of several of those incidents. CLICK HERE TO GET THE BOOK..