Child Abuse

We think that child brides only exist in other, far away places where forced marriages are more common.

Prescribe, refer, repeat — that was the drill for several years. It wasn’t until I started to explore the impact of childhood adversity that I saw the big picture, and it began to make sense.

C-PTSD stands for Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, also known as Developmental Trauma Disorder (DTD) or complex trauma. It’s a diagnostic term for a set of symptoms resulting from prolonged social or interpersonal stress, especially in the context of interpersonal dependence. It’s a tricky diagnosis to land on, given the way trauma is dealt with in the mind and by society. Like Kristof, I wouldn’t have told you there was anything wrong with my childhood. It took years of therapy to catalog early life experiences that were profoundly affecting, if not necessarily severe.

The thing about trauma is that it creates inherently unreliable witnesses. Victims tell as much as they can bear to tell, in that moment, and perhaps even as much as they can remember. Memories can be hazy and dim until the second that the curtain is lifted and the body is thrust back into the moment of abuse. There is no such thing as one way of processing trauma, and there is no perfectly linear path to recovery, either.

I don't know what your family has told you, but it isn't normal for a brother to fondle his sisters as they sleep or while he reads them a story.

All responses by victims of incest are valid. Fear, anger, and rage are often the most understandable, but victims often love their abusers, too. That love doesn't always vanish the second that abuse occurs, and in fact many abusers rely on that love to conceal and even continue the abuse.

Make no mistake: Josh Duggar is the one and only person responsible for molesting his sisters. But it's naive to pretend that the environment in which he was raised had no impact on his actions.

It's easy and painless to poke our noses into the minutiae of other parents' decisions, but it in no way tackles the real epidemic of child abuse.