Domestic violence could be stopped earlier, says study

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abuse, abusive relationships, Children, coercion, control, coping, danger, domestic abuse, domestic violence, fear, harm, health workers, help, impact, isolation, murder, police, professionals, relationships, risk, serious injury, teenagers, training

Domestic violence could be stopped earlier, says study

Victims of domestic violence are abused for almost three years before they get the help they need, and some are subjected to more than 50 incidents during that time, according to a study of the largest database of domestic violence victims in the UK.

The figures from the domestic abuse charity SafeLives reveal that almost a quarter of “high-risk” victims have been to an A&E with injuries sustained during violent abuse, and some went as many as 15 times before the problem was addressed.

Analysis of the SafeLives database, which has records of more than 35,000 cases of adults experiencing domestic abuse since 2009, found that 85% of victims had been in contact with an average of five professionals in the year before they got “effective” help from an independent domestic violence adviser (IDVA) or another specialist practitioner.

“Time and time again no one spots domestic abuse, even when victims and their children come into contact with many different public agencies. It’s not acceptable that victims should have to try to get help repeatedly. This leaves victims living in fear and danger and risks lifelong harm to their children,” said Diana Barran, the chief executive of SafeLives, which was previously called Co-ordinated Action Against Domestic Abuse (Caada).

Barran said the study was “more shocking evidence” that domestic violence could often be stopped earlier. “Every conversation with a professional represents a missed opportunity to get victims and their children the help they need,” she said.

SafeLives estimates that there are at least 100,000 victims at high risk of murder or serious injury in England and Wales, 94% of them women.

The study found that victims and often their children lived with abuse for an average of 2.7 years. Three-quarters reported abuse to the police, and 23% went to A&E because of violence sustained in abusive relationships.

Frances Wedgwood, a GP in Lambeth who provides training on domestic violence to health workers through the national Iris project, said a challenge for doctors was that many women did not come to them to disclose domestic violence.

“Domestic violence is still a very hidden problem and in my experience women do not disclose if they are not asked,” she said. “We need to get better at asking people directly if they need help.”

The study sheds light on the long-lasting impact of living in a family coping with domestic violence. According to the survey, in about a quarter of cases on the domestic violence database the victim has a child under the age of three. The study estimates that 130,000 children in the UK are living with domestic abuse, and that children are directly harmed in 62% of cases.

Among teenagers who suffered domestic abuse in their own relationships, almost half had grown up in households where violence was commonplace, the study found.

Vera Baird, former solicitor general and the current police and crime commissioner for Northumberland, said professionals needed help and training to have the confidence to deal with domestic violence.

“Domestic abuse is not a one-off violent attack. It is deliberate long-term use of coercion to control every part of the partner’s life. Violence, sexual abuse, financial control, constant criticism, isolating from family and friends are all familiar tools,” she said.

“People in that situation do not find it easy to speak and need those who could help to be alert. The alternative is what these figures suggest: victims and their families locked unnecessarily into cruelty and ill-treatment for years.”

Case study

Rebecca, 34, lived with domestic abuse for eight years before she sought help

One time I was having a nap in the afternoon, the baby had been teething so I’d been awake all night, and I woke up he was standing over me with a mop handle carved into a point, like a spear. He was pushing it into my throat, accusing me of cheating. Then he picked me up and threw me against the wall. I ran downstairs but he followed me, kicking and punching me and split my lip.

I locked myself in the bathroom and called 999. When the doorbell rang I heard chatting, calm talking. There was one young male officer, and my ex-partner was telling him that I was postnatal, that I’d gone mental and he was just defending himself. I started shouting at the officer: ‘Why aren’t you helping me?’ I swore and the officer said people could hear me, and it was a public disturbance so I swore again. He put handcuffs on me. He wouldn’t let me put my shoes on, so I wouldn’t move, and he lifted me up by the handcuffs and put me in the back of the car.

I was in a cell for hours asking for a solicitor. The duty sergeant finally came and when he opened the hatch he could see I’d been attacked. He got the officer to come and apologise to me and asked me if I wanted to file a complaint, or if I wanted to press charges against my partner. But I said no. I was exhausted and my baby was at home with my partner, who’d been drinking since the morning. It got worse after that. He was sort of smug, saying he could do what he wanted. I know there’s more training for police now, but that put me off calling the police for years.

By 2003/4 the abuse was worse. We had two girls by that time. I was hospitalised with concussion after he’d kicked me in the head wearing steel-toe-capped boots. The police and the paramedics came and I was patched up and sent home. They asked me if I wanted to press charges but I didn’t want to go through all that, I thought it would make it worse. I didn’t know where the support would come from, where I could get help.

Another time I went to the hospital walk-in. I had a black eye and it wasn’t getting better. A doctor asked me what had happened and I said I’d been punched in the face. He repeated what I said: ‘You were punched in the face.’ I didn’t know what he wanted me to say. I was ashamed, I didn’t want to say my husband did this to me. If he had asked, I’d have told him. But he didn’t.

Social services got in touch because of the paramedics’ reports; he got put on an anger management course. But Christmas Day night he’d been drinking. He grabbed me by the throat and I stumbled and fell; he kept kicking me over and over again. My teeth went through my lip, my nose was bleeding, I couldn’t see. He picked me up and carried me to the bathroom saying: ‘Look what you made me do. Why did you do that?’ I crawled to the living room and phoned the police before he ripped it out of the wall.

I did press charges that time. He was sentenced to four months for ABH. He served two. We were separated, but we got back together. Why? I had such low self-esteem and he was always there, always pestering me, grinding me down. He’d be so nice, helping with the children and I was exhausted, I needed the help. I thought it might be OK.

It was OK for a while. The kids had been on the at-risk register because a couple of incidents had been reported, but they came off that and social services were visiting less. His behaviour just went back to the way it had been before, and that’s when I decided to leave.

I remember the exact moment when I saw the sticker for the Women’s Aid helpline: it was on the back of the toilet door in Asda. It took me a couple of months to call but when I did they offered me refuge. I didn’t even know that existed. They organised transport when he was out. It was quite surreal, but it was such a relief.

Women’s Aid were so helpful, they gave us so much support including counselling. My eldest daughter was seven when we left, her sister was three and their brother was nine months. That was the main reason I left, I was terrified for my kids.

I do think professionals should offer support. If they can’t support victims themselves, they just need to know who can. I think if I’d had that information I would have left earlier.

I was 16 when we got together; he was 23. By the time I was 17 we had a daughter. I thought it was a good relationship, he helped with the parenting and around the house, but about a year later, in 1999, slowly controlling behaviour crept in. He wouldn’t like certain friends, or me going out without him, wearing certain clothes or makeup. It was quite subtle at first, but then when we argued there was pushing, then hair-pulling – each time it was a little worse than before.

Soon it was normal to have slapping, kicking, punching, throwing things. At first I didn’t tell anyone; my self-esteem was very low. I just tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, I didn’t know anything about domestic abuse.

If psychosis is a rational response to abuse, let’s talk about it

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abuse, cbt, culture, diagnosis, hearing voices, medication, paranoia, psychological support, psychosis, schizophrenia, trauma

If psychosis is a rational response to abuse, let’s talk about it

There is something of a sea change in the way we understand experiences that have traditionally been labelled as psychotic. In our culture at least, experiences such as hearing voices or seeing visions have long been viewed by the medical establishment as unequivocal symptoms of mental illness. Treatment has tended to focus on the suppression of such “symptoms” using antipsychotic medication.

Research (often funded by drugs companies) has been largely concerned with the brain as a physical organ, rather than with the person within whose head it is housed, or indeed with their life experience. And, because of the presumption that psychotic symptoms are the preserve of mentally ill people, estimates of the numbers affected have been based on the numbers who have received a particular diagnosis.

But a report published last week by the British Psychological Society’s division of clinical psychology, challenges many of these assumptions.Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia presents a compelling case for trying to understand psychotic experiences as opposed to merely categorising them. It argues that such experiences can be understood from a psychological perspective, in the same way as other thoughts and feelings, rather than being placed on the other side of an artificial sick/healthy divide.

And, indeed, they appear to be much more common than is frequently supposed. According to the report, up to 10% of the population has heard a voice speaking when nobody was there and almost one in three holds beliefs that might be considered paranoid. Two in three people who had heard voices or seen visions did not seek help because they were untroubled by them. And, of course, there is huge diversity in the way such experiences are understood and valued in different cultures.

For those who find their experiences unwelcome and disturbing (and they can be extremely disturbing; I don’t think anyone questions that) the range of help on offer is decidedly limited. Despite the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence recommending that everyone with a diagnosis of schizophrenia is offered cognitive behaviour therapy(CBT), only one in 10 has access to it. Treatment by medication alone, forcibly if needed, is the norm.

It is widely accepted that early life experience, trauma, abuse and deprivation greatly increase the risk of developing psychosis. Indeed,research suggests that experiencing multiple childhood traumas gives approximately the same risk of developing psychosis as smoking does for developing lung cancer.

Many people object to the psychotic label because they consider their experiences a natural reaction to the abuse they have suffered, and even a vital survival tool. What they want above all is space and time to talk about their experiences and to make sense of them. It is shocking how few are given this opportunity.

Of course, psychological approaches to helping those with psychosis will not suit everyone. There are those for whom a diagnosis can come as a welcome relief. Many people find medication helpful, as treatment on its own or alongside talking therapies.

In fact, one of the most persuasive messages of the report is that people should be allowed to understand their experience in their own way, without professionals insisting on a particular interpretation.

It is a highly collaborative approach and fitting that at least a quarter of those who contributed to the report have lived experience of psychosis. Their opinions and experiences are as varied as you would expect with any group of individuals but together they comprise an enormously powerful and vivid testimony to the full range of human experience and to the many and varied ways in which we can help each other to make sense of it.

‘Culture of denial’ leaving UK children at risk of serious abuse

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abuse, blame, child abuse, child sexual exploitation, Children, denial, gangs, perpetrators, rape, sexual exploitation, silence, violence

‘Culture of denial’ leaving UK children at risk of serious abuse

Children are at risk of serious abuse across England because of a culture of “wilful blindness” about the scale and prevalence of sexual exploitation across swaths of local government and in police forces, the deputy children’s commissioner warns.

In a highly critical interview given in the aftermath of the Rotherham abuse inquiry, which concluded that hundreds of children may have been abused there over a 16-year period, Sue Berelowitz said she had been “aghast” at the examples of obvious errors and poor practice she found.

Berelowitz told the Guardian she had discovered that police and council officers were in some cases still either looking the other way, not asking questions or claiming abuse was confined to a certain ethnic group – such as Asian men – or a particular social class.

Berelowitz is the author of a detailed report into child sexual exploitation in gangs and groups last year following a series of high-profile cases in towns such as Rochdale and Oxford as well as Rotherham.

On a recent field visit to a police force, Berelowitz was surprised to learn that the officers’ top search on their internal computer profiling system was “Asian male”. When she asked what would happen if the perpetrators were not Asian, the officer in charge replied that the force was “not looking for those”. “I was astonished. I said: ‘I think you better start looking.'”

She said that in other cases a culture of blaming the victims remained prevalent: “I had another case when I met the chair of the safeguarding board of a large city [meant to co-ordinate the protection of children from abuse or neglect]. When I mentioned cases of child sex exploitation, he said: ‘Oh yeah, those two girls are prostitutes always walking up and down this street.’ I won’t mention the city as you’d be aghast to learn who it was.”

Berelowitz said she was shocked to discover that although “there had been progress” by authorities in the aftermath of the grisly series of gang-rape and trafficking scandals, “there are still instances of not looking, of wilful blindness. We have to be careful none of us is in denial about the terrible reality of what happened in places like Rochdale and Rotherham.”

Because the subject matter is uncomfortable and scrutiny damaging, Berelowitz added that there was a “culture of denial” that had been exposed by Prof Alexis Jay’s inquiry into the handling of child abuse in Rotherham. It found at least 1,400 children were sexually exploited by predominantly Asian criminal gangs between 1997 and 2013.

A day after the Jay report was published, South Yorkshire’s police and crime commissioner Shaun Wright, a former Labour councillor who was cabinet member for children and youth services on Rotherham council between 2005 and 2010, came under intense pressure to resign his post.

On Wednesday night, after the Labour threatened to suspend him, he resigned from the party but insisted he remained committed to his police role. He said: “I was elected to deliver the people’s policing and crime priorities in South Yorkshire, and I intend to see that duty through.”

Theresa May, the home secretary, and Wright’s party, Labour, both said he should go. Wright’s former colleague and council leader, Roger Stone, resigned following publication of the Jay report.

Berelowitz’s comments, however, are intended to broaden the issue beyond Rotherham and similar cases of abuse. She cautioned that despite the emphasis placed on the fact that most of the victims in the northern towns were poor and white, while the perpetrators were Asian, she said that the issue affected “all communities, all races”.

“Usually people say to me that it was an issue of Asian males and white girls. When we dug deeper we found Afro-Caribbean girls and sometimes boys as victims, or Roma perpetrators. There’s a culture of wilful denial to the reality out there. It’s white people, it’s Asians. Parts of every community are involved.”

Most troubling was the rise of peer-to-peer sexual abuse and exploitation, where both victims and perpetrators are minors. She said that in another extremely disturbing case, police officers had caught a gang of 14- and 15-year-olds who had gang-raped an 11-year-old over a number of days. “The police caught the offenders and charged them not with rape, but with drugs offences. I told them that the message was ‘don’t do drugs but rape is fine’. The force is now working to bring the case back.”

She also warned that the rise of technology had enabled children to be seduced and controlled more easily than before, with young girls texted threats to “murder their mother, whom a gang leader has just seen pull up in a new car, if they talk about an attack” or blackmailed with an incriminating video taken on a mobile of their own rape, filmed to ensure their silence.

There was also a gap in the research explaining what led apparently otherwise normal men to commit rape and torture on often vulnerable girls, Berelowitz said.

“Most of the research into adult males who sexually abuse children in paedophilic mode has been on white males serving long sentences in prison. There’s no research into the particular model of Rotherham or Oxford or Sheffield.

“My own personal hypothesis is that they live in a patriarchal environment and are likely to have grown up with a fair amount of domestic violence.”

The scale of abuse, too, was alarming. The office of the Children’s Commissioner estimated that 16,500 children are at risk from abuse from criminal gangs. In London there are about 3,500 street-gang members, Berelowitz’s most recent work says, adding that estimates that one in 20 of the population had suffered intra-familial abuse “are far too low”. “In London alone there are about 3,500 young people aged between 13 and 25 involved in street gangs. There is a level of extraordinary violence involved. Now any girl living in a neighbourhood is at risk. I’d say there was more than one girl for every gang member at risk,” she said.

Reinforcing the point that the problem is not easily categorised, a report from University College London and Barnardo’s reveals that the number of boys affected by child sexual exploitation may be much higher than previously thought. The report – which looked at 9,042 children affected by childhood sexual exploitation and supported by Barnardo’s since 2008 – reveals that 2,986, or one in three, were male.

Society, said Berelowitz, was only just coming to terms with the disturbing nature of the problem and the scale of the abuse. “I think we are facing a public health problem here. We need to mount a public information campaign like that done about seatbelts and get money for therapy. We cannot arrest our way out of this problem.”

The dark side of psychology in abuse and interrogation

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abuse, ethical standards, interrogation, psychologists, Torture

The dark side of psychology in abuse and interrogation

This week the Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) and the Open Society Foundations (OSF) have published the most comprehensive study on the role of psychologists in the War on Terror. At 269 pages, the full report is as detailed as it is grim, concluding that American psychologists collaborated extensively with the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and the CIA to develop a range of interrogation methods used in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay.

The list of methods is horrifying: beatings, exposure to extreme cold, shackling, repeated slamming into walls, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, exposure to prolonged white noise and yelling, forced nakedness, exploitation of phobias, slaps to the face and abdomen, cramped confinement, prolonged stress positions (such as having hands and feet chained to the floor), forced feeding via gastrointestinal tubing, sexual and religious humiliation, forcible restraint of the head, deprivation of basic items such as sheets, blankets and mattresses (termed “comfort items”), threats to the detainee’s family, asphyxiation, and waterboarding.

The report documents how psychologists consulted with the military under the Orwellian euphemism of “safety officers”. Their official role was to work in Behavioral Science Consultation Teams to “identify vulnerabilities of detainees and collaborate with interrogators in exploiting them”. Psychologists were selected for these positions based on professional training in clinical and forensic psychology. Yet while clearly valuing these qualifications, the military classified the psychologists as “combatants” rather than health practitioners, a move which enabled them to bypass normal ethical standards.

Those ethical standards themselves are unclear. The American Psychological Association (APA) – the official professional body for psychologists in the US – officially rejects torture but it also supports the role of psychologists in interrogation: “It is consistent with the APA Ethics Code for psychologists to serve in consultative roles to interrogation and information-gathering processes for national-security related purposes”. The APA has yet to indicate which, if any, of the methods listed in the IMAP/OSF report would be consistent with its ethical policy.

The position of the British Psychological Society is even less clear. On the one hand the Society condemns torture yet at the same time remains silent on whether psychologists can assist with interrogation or other military objectives. As with the APA’s policy, the point at which interrogation becomes abuse is left unsaid, the boundaries of unethical conduct given room to move.

The report makes a number of concrete recommendations, calling for US president Barack Obama to apply more strict prohibitions on the use of “sleep deprivation, isolation, exploitation of fear, and other interrogation methods that violate international standards”. It also urges the APA to clarify its ethical policy and “repudiate the report of its Presidential Task Force…that condones the participation of psychologists in interrogation”.

These are undoubtedly vital reforms, but the facts uncovered by this study raise even more fundamental questions. In the quest for national security, is there a genuine balance to be met between the ideologies of “do no harm” and “prevent harm being done”? At what point (if any) is it morally acceptable for psychologists to be deployed as weapons of war? As important as it is for the psychological profession to clarify its policies on these issues, it is also not for psychologists alone to provide the answers. That responsibility is shared by all citizens of a free society.

I was sold by Mum and Dad to make images of child abuse

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abuse, Children, dissociation, family, parents, relationships, sexual exploitation, support, Trafficking, trauma

I was sold by Mum and Dad to make images of child abuse

One of Raven Kaliana’s earliest memories is being taken to a family portrait studio by her parents, at around the age of four. The studio was in the basement of a department store in a town 50 miles from their home. Once they had arrived, they waited for another couple to arrive with their own child.

“Would you like to have your picture taken with this cute little boy?” her mother asked, before the parents left the kids with the photographer and retired to the cafe upstairs. But while they sat eating ice cream, the images being made in the studio down below were far from happy family portraits. Raven and her companion had just been sold into the child abuse industry.

It was to be the beginning of a 15-year ordeal, which saw Raven regularly trafficked by her parents and other members of an organised crime ring from her home in a middle-class suburb in the American north-west to locations all over the US and abroad. In her teens, the crimes were often perpetrated in Los Angeles, where many film studios provided ample opportunity for the underground child abuse industry in the 70s and 80s.

Her father, precariously self-employed after losing his teaching job, was violent towards her younger brother, but since she had become the family breadwinner, Raven was granted a peculiar status. “My father always favoured me because I brought in the money – I was supporting our whole family. My younger brother was jealous because of my dad’s special treatment of me.

“My father was also quite affectionate towards me whereas he would beat my brother to a pulp. Although he did hit me, he wanted me to stay intact because the less scars I had, the more I was worth.”

Inevitably, as she grew older, Raven’s value to her abusers decreased and subsequently the kinds of films she was required to take part in became more extreme and violent.

Yet from a young age, she had learned from her parents to rationalise and deny what was going on within the family. “It’s the same way that someone who has a problem with alcohol will rationalise their behaviour – ‘It’s only this many drinks. It’s before noon but, oh well, just today’.

“I remember my mother saying things like, ‘Oh, they’ll never remember it,’ like people do when they get their babies’ ears pierced. I told myself that my parents meant well, that what I was going through was what was necessary to help my family. It was paying our mortgage.”

As we sit talking in a central London cafe, there are two large suitcases on the floor next to us, both full of puppets she has made. A graduate of the puppetry course at the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama in London, Raven turned to this artform as a way of telling her story without the gaze of an audience focusing on her directly – something she finds too uncomfortable.

Her adult life has been driven by the belief that it is important for survivors of child sexual exploitation and trafficking to tell their stories, in order to make people realise that these aren’t crimes that happen “somewhere else, to someone else”. She moved to the UK to create Hooray for Hollywood, an autobiographical play in which the children are represented by puppets, while the adults – their parents – are only shown up to waist height, from a child’s eye view. This critically acclaimed drama has toured the UK, Poland and France, and has been made into a film.

One of the most shocking aspects of Hooray for Hollywood is the banality of the adults’ conversation, as they rationalise the choice they have just made to sell their children, from the cosy confines of a cafe. These appear to be ordinary people, struggling a little to make ends meet; not monsters or weirdos, but the kind of people who might be your nextdoor neighbours.

“You hear about a perpetrator being processed in a certain way, you hear about the police getting hold of the images, but you don’t hear about the reality for the children in those images – whose children are they? How did they come to be in this situation? And how have they been traumatised or damaged by what happened?”

Through her organisation Outspiral, Raven recently launched a national campaign to raise awareness of sex trafficking and familial abuse. She now uses the film of Hooray for Hollywood for public education and training for professionals working in social services, education, law enforcement and children’s charities.

The biggest challenge, she says, is getting the bystanders in the child’s life – neighbours, relatives, teachers, care workers, counsellors – to consider the possibility that a child might be a victim of this form of abuse. Child abuse is such a taboo subject, and the concept of parents being complicit in the crime so unthinkable, that frequently there is a failure to recognise that it might be going on. Yet since Raven’s childhood, the internet has led to an explosion in the industry, which now has a worldwide market value of billions of dollars, according to the UN.

Britain’s Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre, a division of the police, says the number of indecent images of children in circulation on the internet runs into millions, with police forces reporting seizures of up to 2.5m images in single collections alone, while the number of individual children depicted in these images is likely to be in the tens of thousands. The commonest way that offenders found their victims was through family and personal relationships.

A report by the NSPCC highlighted the particular psychological suffering that children who have been sexually abused within the child abuse industry endure, especially through the knowledge that there is a permanent record of their sexual abuse: “There is nothing they can do about others viewing pornographic pictures or films of themselves, and sometimes their coerced sexual abuse of others, indefinitely.”

For Raven, the psychological effects of her abuse have been extreme. From an early age she began to experience dissociative amnesia – a psychological phenomenon common in victims of inescapable trauma, in which painful experiences are blocked out, leading to gaps in memory. “I started putting things into little rooms in my mind, and it was like: OK, we don’t look in that room,” she says. “When there’s no relief, there’s no one stepping in to save you, and it’s clear you’re just going to have to endure something, then your mind just does that. As a child, dissociation is a serious survival advantage, but in adulthood it can become a disability.”

It was at the age of 15 that the coping mechanisms of denial and dissociation began to break down. “At school, I started getting flashbacks – like remembering being in a warehouse the night before – and I could feel in my body it was true, but it was terrifying because I didn’t want those things to be true.”

Astonishingly, she passed through most of school without anyone picking up on what was happening at home. “I got good marks at school, so teachers tended to think everything was fine. Most survivors I’ve known who experienced extreme abuse did very, very well at school, actually, because that was their sanctuary, a place they could go to be safe.”

Eventually, however, a teacher noticed that Raven was getting thinner. Her mother, by now separated from her father but still facilitating the abuse, had simply stopped buying food for her. “The teacher invited me to stay after school and talk with her one day, and she asked, ‘Tell me the truth, are you anorexic? Bulimic?’ And I started laughing.”

Raven confided some but not all of what was happening at home, but begged the teacher not to report it for fear of reprisals. What the teacher did do, however, was to help her find the wherewithal to move out of home eventually, get a job in a restaurant, and start saving up for college.

At university, Raven finally made a break from her family, changed her name and started to get counselling – the beginning of a long road to recovery that still continues. “I got into a support group for rape survivors, and it was a great help because all of a sudden I was around other people healing from abuse, too. It also gave me some perspective about how the things that had happened to me were really on the extreme end. I saw people completely devastated by one experience of being raped by a stranger, so it was sobering to realise, ‘Oh, I’ve been raped by hundreds of people.'”

Once she was in a safe environment, finally the rage about what had happened to her bubbled to the surface. “I couldn’t believe how angry I was when I first escaped – so angry. In one support group they let us take a baseball bat to a punching bag and told us to think about a specific abuse event and imagine that we were fighting back against it, and that was very helpful.”

She also saw an integrative bodywork therapist, who used touch, guided movement and vocal expression. “Her premise was that post-traumatic stress is a physical reaction in your body, and that reconnecting the symptom to the source helps you let it go, helps you release it, and that you don’t have to talk out every single thing that ever happened to you. It was very helpful for me because there were a lot of strange things that my body was doing. For example, I used to find any kind of physical touch excruciating – even if someone brushed me in the street I would shudder. She told me that was called armouring, which happens when your body makes a shield out of its muscles to protect the bones and internal organs during physical abuse.”

The therapy made it possible for her to move on and start to enjoy life. “I realised that it is possible to get your life back. I started to gain an appreciation for life and a recognition that I only have so many breaths, so I’ve got to use them well.”

But Raven believes she will always need counselling and that her experiences have made it difficult not to fall into a pattern of emotionally abusive romantic relationships.

Perhaps surprisingly, sex has not been a significant issue, but love is inextricably connected for her with betrayal, as the people who were meant to love her most as a child were the ones who orchestrated her abuse.

Yet, incredibly, she says she felt love for her parents as a child and still does, although she has cut all contact with them. Despite their behaviour, she believes they did love her.

“When I screen my film, a lot of times in the Q&A session afterwards people want to know: how could parents do this to their own children? I tell them that abuse is generational: my parents were also abused themselves, so that was normal to them. They had dissociated in the same way I did; they were in denial. Unlike my generation, they didn’t have access to counselling when they were young, and weren’t born in a time when child abuse was beginning to be acknowledged by society. It’s important to recognise that they weren’t born evil – they were damaged.”

Raven thinks that the way in which child abusers such as Jimmy Savile are demonised is counterproductive. “Demonising the perpetrators elevates them to the realm of the surreal. We need to shift that, so people recognise that they are very sick humans and that there’s a context for their crimes.

“Only then can we tackle the source of this suffering.”

 Outspiral.org.uk

When the Bully Is a Sibling

Tags

abuse, aggression, anxiety, Bullying, Children, Depression, family, Self-esteem, siblings, young people

When the Bully Is a Sibling

Siblings have been bickering and trading blows since the time of Cain and Abel. But the torment and fighting that is often shrugged off as normal sibling rivalry may not always be so benign.

New research suggests that even when there are no physical scars, aggression between siblings can inflict psychological wounds as damaging as the anguish caused by bullies at school or on the playground. The findings offer an unusual look at an area of family life that has rarely been studied, in part because infighting among brothers and sisters is widely considered a harmless rite of passage.

But ordinary skirmishes over the remote or joystick are one thing, experts say, and chronic physical and verbal abuse, particularly when it is directed at one sibling, is another. The new study, which involved thousands of children and adolescents around the country, found that those who were attacked, threatened or intimidated by a sibling had increased levels of depression, anger and anxiety.

Corinna Jenkins Tucker, the lead author of the study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics, said that behaviors among siblings that cross the line into abuse deserve more recognition.

“Historically, the general thinking has been that it’s not a big deal, and sometimes it’s even viewed as being a good thing,” said Dr. Tucker, an associate professor of family studies at the University of New Hampshire. “There appears to be different norms of acceptability. Peer aggression is unacceptable, but it’s not the same for siblings.”

Dr. Tucker said that the growing number of programs and public service announcements aimed at stopping bullying and violence in schools and other settings should include a focus on sibling relationships as well.

“The aggression among siblings should be taken just as seriously as that among peers,” she said.

While normal rivalries with siblings can encourage healthy competition, the line between healthy relations and abuse is crossed when one child is consistently the victim of another and the aggression is intended to cause harm and humiliation, said John V. Caffaro, a clinical psychologist and the author of “Sibling Abuse Trauma.” Parents who fail to intervene, play favorites or give their children labels that sow divisions — like “the smart one” and “the athlete” — can inadvertently encourage conflict.

Nationwide, sibling violence is by far the most common form of family violence, occurring four to five times as frequently as spousal or parental child abuse, Dr. Caffaro said. According to some studies, nearly half of all children have been punched, kicked or bitten by a sibling, and roughly 15 percent have been repeatedly attacked. But even the most severe incidents are underreported because families are loath to acknowledge them, dismissing slaps and punches as horseplay and bullying as boys just being boys, he said.

“Our society tends to minimize child-on-child violence in general,” he added. “We have these ideas that if you’re hurt by a child it’s less injurious than if you’re hurt by an adult, but the data don’t support that.”

In the new report, Dr. Tucker and her colleagues studied 3,600 children using data from the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence, which collects information on children and teenagers under 17. Previous studies of sibling violence, which are few in number, have typically been small or narrowly focused on specific forms of aggression.

But the new research, conducted through interviews with children and their parents, measured the impact of a broad range of violence. It looked at physical assaults with and without weapons and the destruction or stealing of property, as well as threats, name-calling and other forms of psychological intimidation.

The researchers also measured the same types of behaviors perpetrated by peers outside the home and accounted for them in their findings in order to tease apart the specific toll of sibling violence.

Over all, a third of the children in the study reported being victimized by a brother or sister in the previous year, and their scores were higher on measures of anxiety, depression and anger.

Catherine Bradshaw, an expert on bullying and the deputy director of the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence at Johns Hopkins University, said the study was impressive in its scope and scale, and noted that it showed that all types of sibling aggression, from mild to severe, were associated with worse mental health.

“Parents at times might be thinking that their kids can fight it out or that a little bit of victimization might not be so bad,” she said. “But these findings suggest that the threshold is pretty low. It’s not just the rough stuff you have to keep an eye out for.”

Dr. Caffaro said that the effects of sibling abuse often continue into adulthood. Over the years he has treated patients who struggled with emotional issues and sabotaged themselves in their careers because of repeated humiliation they experienced at the hands of a brother or sister.

“It can erode their sense of identity and their self-esteem,” he said.

Parkinson’s sufferers ‘face abuse’ because of symptoms

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abuse, discrimination, drunkenness, Parkinson's disease, prejudice, symptoms

Parkinson’s sufferers ‘face abuse’ because of symptoms

Parkinson’s disease sufferers are being subjected to “intolerable levels of prejudice”, a charity has warned, after it was found that two in five of those afflicted with the disease have experienced discrimination because of their symptoms.

Parkinson’s UK said that 41 per cent of sufferers say they have been discriminated against because they suffer from the disease.

And 8 per cent said they have experienced hostility or have been verbally abused in public because of symptoms of the neurological condition , according to a new poll conducted by Parkinson’s UK on 2,900 sufferers.

The degenerative disease affects 127,000 people across the UK, and symptoms can include shaking, slowness of movement and rigidity.

The research, undertaken to highlight Parkinson’s Awareness Week, also found that one in five Parkinson’s sufferers have had their symptoms mistaken for drunkenness.

And almost a quarter of sufferers admitted they avoid going out at busy times of the day because they are wary of people’s reactions to them.

Steve Ford, chief executive at Parkinson’s UK, said: “Our research confirms that far too many people with Parkinson’s are having to battle against intolerable levels of prejudice.

“Life with Parkinson’s can be challenging enough, but when that is coupled with feeling scared to even go out in public for fear of freezing in a busy queue and being tutted or stared at – as over half the people we spoke to do – life can feel incredibly cruel.

“Time and again people with Parkinson’s have to fight against the old stereotype that the condition is just a tremor. This basic misunderstanding has sentenced people with Parkinson’s to a life of hurtful comments, being refused service in shops and even being shouted at in the street all because people have mistaken their speech or movement problems – a common symptom of the condition – for drunkenness.”

Sufferer Ruth Martin, a mother of two from Holmfirth, west Yorkshire, said that since her diagnosis in 2008 she has struggled to deal with how people react to her condition.

The 41-year-old said: “I’ve experienced all sorts of discrimination since I’ve had Parkinson’s, but one incident really stands out. I was having a bad day and was waiting in a queue in a pharmacy. The man standing behind me with his wife said really loudly to her “just stand back a bit love, the woman in front has been drinking”.

“I felt like crying but even so I told him that I had Parkinson’s. The whole shop was listening and there was part of me that wanted to scream out – I felt like I couldn’t go anywhere.

“People have been very confrontational towards me, and I have even been followed round a supermarket by a security guard who obviously thought I was acting suspiciously. I just wish that if people saw others staggering or struggling that it would cross their minds to wonder if they’ve got Parkinson’s.”

Domestic violence: ‘As a man, it’s very difficult to say I’ve been beaten up’

Tags

abuse, domestic violence, embarrassment, men, partner abuse, stigma, taboo, violence

Domestic violence: ‘As a man, it’s very difficult to say I’ve been beaten up’

An inch under six foot tall, Dave, a gardener with a deep, gravelly voice is not most people’s idea of a domestic violence victim. But he suffered two years of abuse at the hands of his girlfriend and was too embarrassed and loyal to report her to the police. He slept in his car for weeks before speaking to his local council, who found him a place at a men’s refuge.

He struggles to keep it together when he recalls the day his girlfriend smashed a bottle of Jack Daniels across his head, leaving him bleeding on the pavement: a deep scar is still clearly visible on his forehead. But when the 45-year-old from Essex describes the relief of being believed by the authorities, he breaks down, his broad shoulders heaving beneath his rugby shirt.

“When help finally comes it’s an emotional thing,” he says, sitting on the sofa at a safe house in Berkshire where he is being helped to rebuild his life. “As a man, it’s very difficult to say you’ve been beaten up. It seems like you’re the big brute and she’s the daffodil, but sometimes it’s not like that.”

He is one of the lucky few to get help. His refuge has two new requests every day to take in men from across the country who are fleeing violence. The home, which can accommodate three men and their children, is already full.

One in three victims of domestic abuse in Britain is male but refuge beds for men are critically scarce. There are 78 spaces which can be used by men in refuges around Britain, of which only 33 are dedicated rooms for males: the rest can be taken by victims of either gender. This compares with around 4,000 spaces for women. In Northern Ireland and Scotland there are no male refuges at all.

Alan Gibson, an independent domestic violence adviser for Women’s Aid which runs the men’s refuge in Berkshire that is helping Dave, said: “Four organisations phoned us today looking for places for four different men. They’ve been attacked and abused, but there is only one room available in the country and someone will have to decide which of those four men is most in need.”

More married men (2.3 per cent) suffered from partner abuse last year than married women, according to the latest British Crime Survey. Yet help is still much harder to find for men.

Mark Brooks, chairman of the men’s domestic abuse charity, the Mankind Initiative, said: “Support services for male victims remain decades behind those for women. This is not helped by the Government and others having a violence against women and girls strategy without having an equivalent for men. Everybody sees domestic violence victims as being female rather than male. This is one of Britain’s last great taboos.”

The Mankind Initiative helpline receives 1,200 calls a year from men or friends and family calling on behalf of men. Stigma and fear of being disbelieved, among other factors, make men much less likely than women to report abuse to the police. The British Crime Survey found that only 10 per cent of male victims of domestic violence had told the police, compared with 29 per cent of women. More than a quarter of male victims tell no one what has happened to them, compared with 13 per cent of women.

The human cost of ignoring the problem is stark: 21 men were murdered by a partner or former partner in 2010/11.

Kieron Bell very nearly became one of those grim statistics. He is also one of a handful of men who has successfully prosecuted a partner for violence. The 37-year-old bouncer from Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, had to have emergency heart surgery after he was stabbed in the chest by his wife, Sarah, in 2009. She had been violent since the start of their marriage in 2006 but he did not want to turn to the police at first, initially because he still loved her and later because he thought they would never believe that a 5ft 2in woman would be subjecting a bulky 5ft 10in bouncer to a reign of terror.

After the stabbing, his wife tried to claim that Mr Bell fell on a knife but, while recovering in hospital, he decided to report her to the police. In 2010 she was charged with grievous bodily harm and was released from prison only in May last year. “I was scared to call the police. I’m a big bloke and I thought I’d get laughed at,” he said. “I think there needs to be more information out there for blokes. If I’d known what the signs to look out for were before, I could’ve done something sooner. But I loved her and because of my child I stayed with her.”

Nicola Graham-Kevan, an expert in partner violence at Central Lancashire University, said: “Society is blind to women’s aggression. The biggest disparity is women’s ability to seek help which makes men very vulnerable to false allegations. People often won’t believe that men are victims. Men have to be seen as passive, obvious victims with clear injuries, whereas, if a woman makes allegations, they are believed much more easily.”

Dr Graham-Kevan believes the system needs to adjust to make it safer for male victims and their children, who can end up with an abusive mother. “The biggest thing for me as a parent is that children are being placed in significant positions of harm. It sounds anti-feminist, but I think we’re allowing women too many rights in the family court, because courts assume that the women are the best parent as a starting position, rather than looking at it equally.”

A Home Office spokeswoman said: “We recognise that men are victims of domestic violence, too, and they deserve protection. In December 2011, the Home Office set up the Male Victims Fund to support front- line organisations working with male victims of sexual and domestic violence. We also fund the Male Advice (and Inquiry) Line.”

Names have been changed to protect identities

‘My wife attacked me 11 times. I didn’t think the police would believe me’

Tim, 59, has severe learning difficulties and is now living in a men’s refuge in Berkshire after his wife assaulted him repeatedly during their short marriage

“My wife attacked me 11 times through our marriage. We were married for 18 months, but, being a bloke, you don’t know where to go to get help.

“She tried to strangle me and she used to bite me. She also stabbed me in the hand with a fork. I’d been on my own for 14 years and she seemed like the right woman for me when we got together.

“The violence started in the first three months of the marriage. She would go for my throat if I wouldn’t do certain things.

“She wouldn’t let me see anyone. My family were trying to help me cope with my disabilities, but she wouldn’t let them come round. On New Year’s Day, she threatened me with a knife and I was frightened. Then the other day she tried to strangle me again.

“My sister said I should call the police, so I did.

“I didn’t think the police would believe me because she always seemed to twist things, but they want me to press charges and make a statement now.”

Congo receives £180m boost to health system to tackle warzone rape

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abuse, conflict, Congo, DRC, rape, sexual abuse, sexual assault, Sexual Violence, soldiers, taboo, training, war, War Crimes, weapon of war

Congo receives £180m boost to health system to tackle warzone rape

When Beatrice was raped, by a gang of soldiers who sauntered by her home and saw her alone, she thought it was the end of world. She could not have imagined then that rape was only the start of a terrible downward spiral that would often seem to have no end.

“My husband came and said what happened? You can’t be telling me the truth. He no longer wanted to be with me and he left. I was alone with five children.”

Beatrice, not her real name, now has a sixth child, the result of the rape. The infant is strapped to her back, and sleeps while she sobs at the memories that stalk her, in a dark room in a hospital in Goma, in the violent south-eastern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“My husband’s parents totally rejected my child. The village did. Everyone who sees me, curses me. They say I am a soldier’s mistress.”

Beatrice’s ever deepening tragedy is also a national nightmare. By the United Nations’ very conservative estimate, 200,000 women have been through a similar ordeal since 1998.

On a trip to Goma, William Hague, the British foreign secretary, launched the UK’s plan to help tackle the crisis, announcing £180m in new funding for the DRC health system, some of which will go to training medical staff to give proper care for rape victims.

Jonathan Lusi, a surgeon at the Goma hospital, both tends to the very serious injuries which accompany rape, and oversees his patients’ psychological recovery, training to give them independent livelihoods.

“We are in a war. It’s a legal vacuum. There is no government, no authority and no values. Rape is a warning sign something has gone very wrong.”

The DRC, after decades of conflict and turmoil is just one of the world’s battlefields where the routine sexual abuse of women and girls is a weapon of war. No one has any idea how many have been raped in Syria, for example. It is hard enough to count the bodies. It is a crime against humanity that often goes unmentioned because of the squeamishness of public officials and the many challenges to collecting evidence. Corpses are easier to count than rapes, while the victims of rape live in societies that enforce silence.

The tens of thousands of rapes during the Bosnian war, for example, have only led to 30 convictions.

The British government will attempt to break the official silence over the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war by taking the unusual step of using its presidency of the G8 this year to put it at the heart of the agenda of the rich nations’ club that has in recent years been preoccupied with economic woes.

“It’s time for the governments of the world to do something about this,” said Hague in an interview with the Guardian during a visit to Goma. “I will argue it has been taboo or ignored and taken for granted for too long … We can move the dial on something like this. We are big enough in the world to do something about this.”

As well as the money pledged to support the DRC health system, Hague also announced £850,000 in support for an advocacy group called Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice to help it document cases in eastern DRC and push the international criminal court (ICC) to take heed of sexual crimes in its deliberations. Other funding will go to Physicians for Human Rights, another NGO, for evidence collection equipment such as locked evidence cabinets for eventual prosecutions.

Such prosecutions are not necessarily a distant aspiration. One of the leaders of the rebel M23 militia, Bosco Ntaganda, handed himself in at the US embassy in Kigali, the capital of neighbouring Rwanda, last week and was flown to face war crimes charges at the ICC in the Netherlands, where he denied charges including murder, rape, pillaging and using child soldiers in his first appearance on Tuesday.

Hague was accompanied in Goma by Angelina Jolie, with whom he has forged an unorthodox partnership to campaign on the issue. He credits Jolie’s film last year about Bosnian rape camps, In the Land of Blood and Honey, with helping to inspire the British initiative.

“The hope and the dream is that next time this happens, it is known that if you abuse women, if you rape the women, you will be accountable for your actions,” Jolie told the Guardian. “This will be a crime of war and you won’t just get away with it.”

Hague and Jolie visited a camp on the shores on Lake Kivu which has sprung up as a result of an upsurge in fighting when the M23 advanced into Goma last November.

Set against a breathtaking backdrop of lake and volcanoes, the camp of 10,000 people is a huddle of meagre straw shelters half covered with tarpaulin.

The women here are forced to venture out of the camp to collect firewood or water. Both make them vulnerable to rape and many of the women and girls have been assaulted. All the International Rescue Committee, which runs the camp, can offer to mitigate the threat are “dignity kits” that contain efficient stoves that require less firewood and extra clothes so the women have to look for washing water less often.

“It’s a sad fact that when you ask how to reduce sexual violence the answer is to help them not have to go out,” Jolie said.

On the way out of the camp a woman who had earlier given Hague and Jolie a reserved factual account of her experiences ran up to them on a last minute impulse: “Please help us. We are being raped like animals.” Hague said: “The memory of meeting her will always stay with me.”

Facebook Is The Worst Social Networking Site For Bullying, New Report Says

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abuse, Bebo, Blackberry Messenger, Bullying, Cyberbullying, Depression, Facebook, harassment, internet, self-harm, social networking sites, Teens, trolling, Whatsapp, young people

Facebook Is The Worst Social Networking Site For Bullying, New Report Says

Facebook is the worst social networking site for internet trolling, and bullying is now more prevalent online than anywhere else, a study has suggested.

Some 87% of teenagers who reported cyber abuse said they were targeted on Mark Zuckerberg’s site, while around one-fifth of youngsters were picked on by Twitter trolls, the report showed.

Those most frequently victimised were 19-year-old boys.

According to the report, 49% of those targeted by bullies were victimised off-line, while 65% of teenagers were subjected to abuse in cyberspace.

Only 37% of those who had experienced trolling ever reported it to the social network where it took place, the report found.

Emma-Jane Cross, CEO and founder of the charity BeatBullying, said many young people were suffering in silence.

“Bullying both on and off-line continues to be a serious problem for a huge number of teenagers and we cannot ignore its often devastating and tragic effects,” she said.

“We work with hundreds of young people being cyber-bullied or trolled so badly that it can lead to depression, truancy, self-harm, or even force them to contemplate or attempt suicide.”

The study, for internet site knowthenet.org.uk, found a number of social networking sites had become “popular forums” for trolls.

Some 13% of the 13 to 19-year-olds consulted claimed they were targeted on BlackBerry Messenger, 8% said they were picked on by trolls on Bebo and 4% said they were victimised on Whatsapp.

Fewer than one in five (17%) teens said their first reaction would be to tell a parent and only 1% of those surveyed said their initial response would be to inform a teacher.

Around 34% of those who were picked on by trolls said their experiences lasted more than a month.

Knowthenet, which released the study, has now launched a “trolling hub” offering advice on how to deal with online bullying.

Opinium Research consulted more than 2,000 teenagers for the study.

A Facebook spokesman said: “There is no place for harassment on Facebook, but unfortunately a small minority of malicious individuals exist online, just as they do offline.

“We have a real name policy and provide people with simple tools to block people or report content which they find threatening so that we can remove it quickly.”

Links to report concerning behaviour on Facebook exist on every page of the site meaning users can report any piece of content.