(no subject)
On the ride back from Tucson over Thanksgiving, it occurred to me that out of 6 of the female friends I have who I consider to be close to me (non-internet friends), 3 of them were sexually abused as children. Another was emotionally abused, and still another has pretty strong abandonment issues, though not in the range of what I'd consider to be out of the norm of family life, but she married someone who was severely sexually abused as a child.
I'm pretty sure that 50% of the American population of women was not sexually abused; though I studied this thoroughly in grad school, I don't remember the stats.
So, the options are:
- Most women's friends' stats are similar, but many don't know about it because people aren't likely to talk about it with others
- I'm drawn to women who have had less than stellar parental examples. Maybe that's a thing within me to act like a parent, or want to be a strong woman as an example, or maybe it's just luck
- Women who have had these experiences are drawn to me, perhaps due to my lack of judgment about those things, my strong personality (good or bad), or maybe it's just luck
- The sexual abuse stats are incidental to whether the friend has low self-esteem; only two out of the six I would consider to have normal, healthy self-esteem. But maybe my standards for "normal" are off, because my own self-esteem seems to be pretty high, and most self-doubt I have would be displayed for anyone to see or discuss. Like, here, for example.
- The whole thing is luck
There's some irony here, and that's that when I was growing up, I got the impression that not that many of my friends had lives that were as screwed up as mine, with my parents' divorce, mother's drinking, and other non-abuse stuff. In retrospect, that's in part because when I talked about the stuff that was going on, and processed through it openly and verbally with my friends, they didn't pipe up and say (or maybe even think) that their own lives were just as messed up. I never considered my childhood to be "messed up," even when I was in it; it was others who seemed to see it that way. Turns out, at least one person who I grew up with had worse experiences, but she was not able to communicate them.
I was wondering how these statistic jive with y'all's, or if you have other explanatory thoughts. I know it's not a subject people love to discuss, but it's a fact of life- humans are capable of sexually abusing children and others, and the more open we are about it, the more we can call it out and mitigate it. At least, I hope.