Taking Pictures

It was learning about the epigenetic impact of intergenerational trauma at a recent clinical training that got our attention, and our podcast interview with Veronique Mead who helped that piece make sense. Susan Pease Banitt also talked about this generational trauma and generational healing on the podcast, when we shared about taking our daughter back to Africa to meet her tribe.

Then, on the AEDP episode, we shared the example of this from the husband’s history. His great-great grandfather was a goat herder in Idaho. One night, they thought they heard a thief, so he and his son (great-grandfather) went out to stop the thief. They left the house, each of them going opposite ways around the house. That’s how the son (great-grandfather) accidentally shot and killed his father (great-great grandfather). The husband shares that this sense of doing your best, and trying to do the right thing, and making an effort to help still to him is experienced neurologically as failure to him. This theme underlies his own depression, so that as he receives EMDR treatment it isn’t just for depression but also for healing this layer that his “good” results in no-good, or even worse-than-failure. It’s fascinating.

This all began an entire “coming out” process for us, taking an entire year from one DID Awareness Day to the next. The first thing we did was write a letter on the ISSTD list serv introducing ourselves by our legal name as the producers of the System Speak podcast. Their warm welcome and positive reception gave us courage, to begin connecting with other professionals more openly, which was completely new to us and something we had never done before even locally. Through these experiences and beginning to make colleagues who turned into friends, a new kind of healing began as we worked through a layer of shame about our own disorder. This led us to also making new friends, both online and in person, through the podcast and “in real life” and at conferences, so that we met other people who were also survivors - even other therapists who were also survivors.

The next thing we noticed was Human Trafficking Awareness Day on January 11, 2020. We paid attention. We learned. The therapist told us it still counts as trafficking if it is your own family doing it to you. It was a difficult realization, and a lot to process, especially in a season of having to change therapists because the family had moved and we needed to join them. Triggers seemed especially raw, especially photographs, which had always been hard for us.

But as the podcast grew to 64 countries, we recognized the platform as a way to educate and support others like us who felt so alone in all they had endured, so we determined to try.

And we started learning.

Then we had Ellen Lacter, PhD, on the podcast, and she said that child pornography should be renamed as “production of child rape and torture materials” because of the severity of the abuse involved with producing child pornography.

That got our attention.

For DID Awareness Day 2020, we consented (as a system) to the article about us being released on ISSTD News. That was a big deal. It was terrifying.

But it was good and right, and it was time. They let us help write it, and they let us choose the pictures.

And for the first time, we released our photo.

This felt empowering, too, as people were trying to DOX us, which means they were writing about us online and releasing our legal name and family details and address against our wishes, endangering both ourselves and revealing our contact information to previous handlers and abusers. It was really traumatic and violating, and doing this on our own terms and “coming out” in our own process was a way to reclaim some of our own choices and safety.

But then, about the same time, we found out the podcast was winning an award from ISSTD, and that as part of accepting the award at the conference in San Francisco, we would be having our picture taken receiving the award.

That was even more terrifying.

It became a huge debate internally, and we discussed in therapy what our choices were: not to go at all, to go but not attend the awards dinner, to attend the awards dinner but not go on stage, to go on stage but not have our picture taken, or just to do it.

And, in a way, there was a pull to just do it. We did not get to go to any of our graduations for any of our degrees. Our high school graduation was a hot mess of family drama and well-meaning people trying to keep us safe but causing other problems. It was a nightmare. This would, in effect, be an opportunity to bring that full circle, even though it was just an award.

Plus, we had just worked hard. Really hard. For two years. A lot has happened on the podcast, and it is a lot of work to keep going. And it was exactly what we had advocated for: the recognition and receiving of lived experience as valid contributors in all kinds of ways. And we had already made so many friends within the ISSTD, so that felt safe. There was maybe a chance we could do it, and it would at least be a safe place to try.

We accepted the award, and filled out the required paperwork, and focused in therapy on getting our picture taken.

There was no pressure, except from us. The ISSTD was very respectful. We had time to figure things out.

And so we did.

We did it with some EMDR to focus on being safe. We did it by talking about safe people taking safe pictures. We did it by rehearsing what would happen: eating the dinner at the table, listening to them say something about the podcast, going up on the stage, accepting the award (no speech required), and having our picture taken “in a flash”. Easy- peasy.

So we practiced with some exposure therapy, trying it out a little at a time.

We made a few videos of our own children, with us in them, and shared one of them.

We took a selfie or two, and sent them to our friend. And to the husband. And then to the Facebook page.

When we found out our daughter was going to have high-risk airway reconstruction surgery again, and a (safe) friend paid a photographer to let us get family pictures taken before surgery, we agreed. This gave us opportunity to meet the photographer, let different ones inside see the camera and the equipment, and allow all of us (inside) to experience “normal” picture taking in a safe setting surrounded by those who love us most.

And we learned a lot, a lot that we want to share.

This information may be very triggering, as we will talk about trafficking and child pornography; however, we are talking about it in terms of explaining it and giving statistics we know from our work.

We will not be “trauma dumping” or making any specific or in-depth disclosures.

But it’s part of our progress, having a voice, and educating, and advocating, in good and healthy ways, even while we work on the rest in our own therapy. It’s also a way, very cognitively, that we can begin to process hard things by putting it into words that feel safer in a more generic sense as we start to do more phase two work in our own therapy. It’s still hard, but kind of more exposure therapy, in a way, of just saying it out loud in words.

We learned that there are between 21-30 million people enslaved in the world, more than at any time in human history. Every day, modern slavery can be recognized: children become soldiers, young women are forced into prostitution and migrant workers exploited in the workforce.

We learned that Human Trafficking Awareness Day started in 2007, when the U.S. Senate designated January 11th as National Human Trafficking Awareness Day in the hopes of raising awareness to combat human trafficking. It began as a U.S. initiative, and the United Nations has started to highlight this topic and work towards global awareness with days such as International Day for the Abolition of Slavery. We are working with some of the humanitarian aid teams working on this actively around the world.

The commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) is a commercial transaction that involves the sexual exploitation of a child, such as the prostitution of children, child pornography, and the (often related) sale and trafficking of children. CSEC may involve coercion and violence against children, economic exploitation, forced labor, contemporary slavery.

A declaration of the World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, held in Stockholm in 1996, defined CSEC as: sexual abuse by the adult and remuneration in cash or kind to the child or a third person or persons. The child is treated as a sexual object and as a commercial object.

CSEC includes child sex tourism and other forms of transactional sex where a child engages in sexual activities to have key needs fulfilled, such as food, shelter or access to education. It includes forms of transactional sex where the sexual abuse of children is not stopped or reported by household members, due to benefits derived by the household from the perpetrator. CSEC also potentially includes arranged marriages involving children under the age of consent, where the child has not freely consented to marriage and where the child is sexually abused. These are things we are working with internationally in our professional work with humanitarian aid teams and UNICEF and UNHCR.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) states that roughly one out of every five girls and one out of every ten boys will be sexually exploited or abused before they become of age.

UNICEF says that child sexual exploitation is "one of the gravest infringements of rights that a child can endure".

Child pornography is prevalent on the international, national, regional, and local levels. Child pornography is a multibillion-dollar enterprise that includes photographs, books, audiotapes, videos and more. These images depict children performing sexual acts with other children, adults, and other objects. The children are subjected to exploitation, rape, pedophilia, and in extreme cases, murder. Pornography is often used as a gateway into the sex trade industry. Many pimps force children into pornography as a way of conditioning them to believe that what they are doing is acceptable. The pimps may then use the pornography to blackmail the child and extort money from clients. There are times this is used in conditioning for, part of grooming for, or alongside with organized or ritual abuse perpetration.

The “Scope and Definition of Child Sexual Abuse Fact Sheet” on StopItNow.org states:

• Sex abuse does include both touching and non-touching behaviors.

• All sexual touching between an adult and a child is sexual abuse.

• Sexual touching between children can also be sexual abuse when there is a significant age difference (often defined as 3 or more years) between the children or if the children are very different developmentally or size-wise.

• Sexual abuse does not have to involve penetration, force, pain, or even touching.

• If an adult engages in any sexual behavior (looking, showing, or touching) with a child to meet the adult’s interest or sexual needs, it is sexual abuse. This includes the manufacture, distribution and viewing of child pornography.

The U.S. Department of Justice defines child pornography:

• as any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a minor (persons less than 18 years old).

• Images of child pornography are also referred to as child sexual abuse images.

• Notably, the legal definition of sexually explicit conduct does not require that an image depict a child engaging in sexual activity. A picture of a naked child may constitute illegal child pornography if it is sufficiently sexually suggestive.

• Additionally, the age of consent for sexual activity in a given state is irrelevant; any depiction of a minor less than 18 years of age engaging in sexually explicit conduct is illegal.

• Federal law prohibits the production, distribution, importation, reception, or possession of any image of child pornography. A violation of federal child pornography laws is a serious crime, and convicted offenders face fines severe and statutory penalties.

The StopItNow.org also gives the following statistics:

• One in 10 children will experience contact sexual abuse in the U.S. before age 18[iii]

• More than 50% of sex abuse survivors were sexually abused before the age of 12.[iv]

• One in 25 children (10-17) will receive an online sexual solicitation[v]

• Of substantiated reports of child maltreatment in the US, 9% were unique survivors of sexual abuse[vi]

• The average age for a minor to enter the sex trade is 12 – 14.[vii]

• Globally, prevalence rates show that a range of 7-36% of women and 3-29% of men experience sexual abuse in childhood.[viii]

• More than one-third (35.2%) of the women who reported a completed rape before the age of 18 also experienced a completed rape as an adult. Thus, the percentage of women who were raped as children or adolescents and also raped as adults was more than two times higher than the percentage among women without an early rape history. [ix]

• 42.2% girls experiencing their first completed rape did so before the age of 18 (29.9% between 11-17 years old and 12.3% at or before age 10) [x]

• Over one-quarter of male victims of completed rape experienced their first rape at or before the age of 10. [viii]

• Children with disabilities are 2.9 times more likely than children without disabilities to be sexually abused.[xi]

• Children with intellectual and mental health disabilities appear to be the most at risk, with 4.6 times the risk of sexual abuse as their peers without disabilities.[xii]

• At least 31% of girls and 7% of boys involved in the juvenile justice system have been sexually abused.[xiii]

• In as many as 93 percent of child sexual cases, the child knows the person that commits the abuse. [xiv]

• Males made up almost 88% of perpetrators [xv]

• 60% of children who are sexually abused do not disclose[xvi] [xvii] [xviii]

• Up to  50% of child sexual abuse cases are perpetrated by someone younger than 18 years old[xix]

• 12 – 24% of sex offenders are known re-offenders [xx]

• Most are acquaintances but as many as 47% are family or extended family.[xxi]

• Juveniles make up 20% of those arrested for sex offenses [xxii]

• The 5-year sexual recidivism rate for high-risk sex offenders is 22% from the time of release, and decreases for this risk level to 4.2% for those who have remained offense-free in the community for 10 years. The recidivism rates of the low-risk offenders are consistently low (1%-5%) for all time periods. [xxiii]

Those of us (in America) who are identified victims of child pornography are notified by the FBI via the Child Pornography Victim Assistance program (CPVA).  If you actively need help now, several related resources are available in the United States:

Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) is a federal office that provides funding to support victim assistance and compensation programs. OVC’s website provides victims with information, resources, and a directory of crime victim services.  You can call them at 1-800-851-3420 or visit www.ovc.gov.

The Child Help USA hotline is a 24-hour hotline dedicated to the prevention of child abuse. It offers crisis intervention, information, literature, and referrals to local emergency, social service, and support resources.  You can call 1-800-4-A-CHILD (1-800-422-4453) or visit www.childhelp.org/hotline.

The National Center for Victims of Crime (NCVC) works with local, state, and federal partners to provide support to crime victims, and also advocates for laws and public policies to secure rights, resources, and protections. The National Crime Victim Bar Association, a program of NCVC, also provides information on civil lawsuits against a perpetrator or other responsible party, as well as referrals for attorneys specializing in victim-related litigation.  You can call 1-800-394-2255 or visit victimsofcrime.org.

These are hard things to live through, and hard things to remember, and hard things to work through. There is no easy way around it, and the layers of it are brutal. The years feel like one rabbit hole after another, with pieces overlapping but each experience distinct and the nights so very long. None of this is easy to talk about, or to acknowledge, or to share. It’s not comfortable to deal with in therapy, and it’s exhausting to avoid in everyday life.

But doing that hard work is the only way to get our power back, and remembering that “it’s not my secret” helps us tell about it.

And the telling matters because none of us are alone, and all of us are worth the healing.

And healing means connecting with those who have been so alone with so much hurt for such a very long time, whether inside or others with stories like ours.

So we did work hard, and we did get ready, even though there is a lot more work to do.

And we did it, even though ISSTD Conference was cancelled the last minute.

I’m proud of us for that.

(Thank you Christine Forner, 2019 ISSTD President, for taking your picture with us!)

We are not going to share more of our own personal story at this time, but sharing this much is a big step. There is THIS very real and personal story HERE, on the Missing and Exploited Children website if you would like to learn more.

Citations for our article are below, with more references available on the StopItNow page HERE.

Baglivio, M. T., Epps, N., Swartz, K., Huq, M. S., Sheer, A., & Hardt, N. S. (2014). The prevalence of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) in the lives of juvenile offenders. Journal of Juvenile Justice, 3(2), 1-23. Retrieved from http://www.journalofjuvjustice.org/JOJJ0302/JOJJ0302.pdf

Bales, Kevin (2003), "Because she looks like a child",  in Hochschild, Arlie; Ehrenreich, Barbara (eds.), Global woman: nannies, maids, and sex workers in the new economy, New York: Metropolitan Books, pp. 207–22.

Barth, J., Bernetz, L., Heim, E., Trelle, S., & Tonia, T. (2013). The current prevalence of child sexual abuse worldwide: A systematic review and meta-analysis. International Journal of Public Health, 58(3), 469-83.

Campagna, Daniel S., and Donald L. Poffenberger. "Child Pornography." The Sexual Trafficking in Children: An Investigation of the Child Sex Trade. Dover, MA: Auburn House Pub., 1988. 116-38. Print.

Campagna, Daniel; Poffenberger, Donald (1988). The sexual trafficking in children: an investigation of the child sex trade. Dover, MA: Auburn House Pub. Co.

Clift, Stephen; Simon Carter (2000). Tourism and Sex. Cengage Learning EMEA. pp. 75–78.

Douglas, E., & Finkelhor, D. (2005). Childhood sexual abuse fact sheet. Retrieved from Crimes Against Children Research Center website: http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/factsheet/pdf/childhoodSexualAbuseFactSheet.pdf

ECPAT International. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.

"Facts on commercial sexual exploitation of children" (PDF). ILO. 2004. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2009-01-06.

Gerdes, Louise I.; Brian M. Willis; Barry S. Levy (2006). Prostitution and sex trafficking: opposing viewpoints. Detroit: Greenhaven Press.

Herrmann, Kenneth J., and Michael Jupp. "International Child Sex Trade." The Sexual Trafficking in Children: An Investigation of the Child Sex Trade. By Daniel S. Campagna and Donald L. Poffenberger. Dover, MA: Auburn House Pub., 1988. 140-57. Print.

"Human Trafficking and Prostitution | Essay Examples". Essay Examples. 2018-03-15. Retrieved 2018-04-03.

Kaufman, Michelle R., and Mary Crawford. "Sex Trafficking in Nepal: A Review of Intervention and Prevention Programs." Violence Against Women 17.5 (2011): n. pag. Sage Journals. Web. 8 Oct. 2013.

Munir, Abu Bakar, and Siti Hajar Bt. Mohd Yasin. "Commercial Sexual Exploitation."Child Abuse Review 6.2 (1997): 147-53. Web. 09 Oct. 2013.

Meyers, J. E. B. (2011). The ASPAC handbook on child maltreatment (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Pais, Marta Santos. "The Protection of Children from Sexual Exploitation Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography." International Journal of Children's Rights 18.4 (2010): 551-66. Criminal Justice Abstracts with Full Text. Web. 09 Oct. 2013.

Roby, J. L. "Women and Children in the Global Sex Trade: Toward More Effective Policy."International Social Work 48.2 (2005): 136-47. Sage Journals. Web. 09 Oct. 2013.

Roby, J.L. (2005). "Women and children in the global sex trade: Toward more effective policy". International Social Work. 48 (2).

Smith, L.A., Vardaman, S. H. & Snow, M. A. (2009). The national report on domestic minor sex trafficking: America’s prostituted children. Retrieved from Shared Hope website: http://sharedhope.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/SHI_National_Report_on_DMST_2009.pdf

Townsend, C. & Rheingold, A.A. (2013). Estimating a child sexual abuse prevalence rate for practitioners: A review of child sexual abuse prevalence studies. Retrieved from www.D2L.org/1in10

UNODC. "Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2012." United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Oct. 2013.

UNODC. "Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2012." United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Oct. 2013.

U.S. Department of Justice. Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children: What Do We Know and What Do We Do about It? Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, 2007. Web. 09 Oct. 2013.

U.S. Department of Justice. Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children: What Do We Know UNICEF and What Do We Do about It? Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, 2007. Web. 09 Oct. 2013.

U.S. Department of Justice (2007). Commercial sexual exploitation of children: what do we know and what do we do about it?. U.S. Dept. of Justice, Office of Justice Programs.

U.S. Department of Justice (2015). Child pornography. Retrieved from http://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/child-pornography.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Children’s Bureau (2015). Child maltreatment 2013. Retrieved from http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/research-data-technology/statistics-research/child-maltreatment.

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