Child Abuse Survivor

Anyone who spends as much time as I do online, and who is an outspoken survivor, inevitably gets bombarded with lots of requests to share information to their readers. Like most of you, I get a lot of those, and if it’s something that I think survivors might benefit from, I’m more than happy to.

What I won’t do, is sign your petition, voice my support, contact the media or a congressperson on behalf of someone I don’t even know. Here’s a good example of why I don’t so that, a Facebook post that went viral, purporting to name a wanted child molester, who in fact is not wanted and has absolutely no legal issues to speak of.

See, here’s the thing. Baseless accusations ruin people’s lives, and they hurt legitimate abuse survivors. If we want a world where abuse victims are to be believed, we need to be extra outspoken against anyone, anywhere, who makes false accusations. We need to be more skeptical when faced with social network posts claiming to raise awareness of a specific case when there is no evidence beyond an anonymous Twitter or Facebook account.

In this case, not only does this individual have a pretty good civil case against the person who started spreading the post, he has one against every single person who thought they were “doing their part” and shared it. Every one of those people has lost credibility. How many false rumors about potential molesters, or false claims of abuse being used as a child custody tool, before we are simply not believed any more? How soon before we reach a point where every claim of abuse is met with skepticism, because there are just so many false ones.

If we expect society to believe victims, then we have to weed out those who would take advantage of that by making false accusations, not continue to spread “support” when we don’t know anything about the case we are publicizing. False accusations are damaging to the people being accused, and to the survivor community in general. Think before you repost.

So, now that we’ve had a few days to sort of digest the news that Google Reader isn’t going to be around, you may be asking yourself what all the fuss is about. Those of you who’ve never used an RSS reader probably don’t understand what you’re missing by following a site on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus or somewhere else, instead of subscribing to the RSS feed. Truth is, when you rely on one of those other services, you probably aren’t seeing everything. Facebook is using some weird algorithm to determine what to show you in your newsfeed, and Twitter is only as good as the amount of time you have to keep up with it. Most of you who use Twitter and know this go with the assumption that the “good” stuff will bubble up to the surface when the other people you follow share it to their network and you’ll see it eventually.

Last week, I wrote about how that changes things from a bloggers perspective. I realize now just how significant a portion of the people who follow me on Twitter, or Facebook, etc. really don’t see what I write here unless others happens to start sharing it. Like I said yesterday, that changes the dynamic between myself, and you as a reader. I’m somewhat at the mercy of you and your willingness to share what I write. Oh sure, there will always be those of us who continue to use RSS readers and subscribe to feeds, but it’s not a growing number or people. We’ll move to some other tool and keep doing what we’ve always been doing. The “growth” is in people scanning Twitter, or using a tool like Flipboard, to simply try and locate the popular things that others are sharing. Those of us who simply like to write and share our thoughts and experiences are facing an even higher hill to climb to get folks to pay attention, because there simply aren’t enough people reading, let alone sharing, to help that larger mass of people find us.

As I said, this changes things. Do I need to go from blogging things I think are interesting, to writing posts designed to get shared more often? And what does that look like, exactly? I don’t know. At least not yet.

In the mean time, if you are interested in actually seeing everything I write here, grab the RSS feed and take a look at some RSS alternatives, or you can always go the old fashioned way, and subscribe to the email list.

Of course, if you aren’t following at all, you can also try the Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus pages as well, and if you want to follow the News and Reviews blog, there’s a separate email list for that as well. You can find it in the upper right-hand corner of the site.

Most of all, I want to say thank you for those of you who do subscribe, or follow in whatever way you currently do so, and for sharing the site among your own network. Obviously, when it comes to building up readership and community around this site, that goes a long, long way!

I was curious about Tumblr so I started a fun little blog about sports, just as a way to learn about the platform. Now that I am looking at it, I wondered if there’s any sort of survivor community on Tumblr or if any of you guys have been using it. Let me know, and if you happen to be a sports fan, check out my Tumblr blog and join the conversation.

http://mikemacsports.tumblr.com/

Since Google announced the new community feature for Google+, I thought creating a community for survivors would be a fun way to experiment with the feature, and see what we could make of it as a group. Not making any promises, but thought it’d be fun and interesting. We’ll see what happens!

If you’re interested in checking it out, you can find it here

Every once in awhile, I need to revisit this topic and explain what this site, and the social network accounts that are tied to this site, are, and aren’t.

While I try to generally be helpful, and allow for survivors to express themselves in the comments here, or over on the Facebook site, it’s recently become somewhat problematic for me because some people simply don’t understand what it is I do here.

First and foremost, I do this in my spare time. I hold down a more than full time job that requires me to travel quite a bit. When I’m not traveling, my highest priority is trying to have a life with my wife, and trying to do things we enjoy together, as well as all the day to day things we all have to do. Somewhere lower down that list of priorities lies running this site, and even further down that list of priorities lies dealing with comments, emails, Facebook posts etc. that people are posting on the site.

So, if you send me an email, I don’t necessarily owe you a response. If you send me an email about something I think would be helpful for readers of the site, or I have a specific interest in, I might very well respond. I might very well share the information here, or I may very well take some of my own time to help you out. But I make no promises.

If you sent me a message on Facebook or Twitter, the same thing holds true. Likewise, even when I do respond, it might take a week, or more.

If my lack of a response somehow offends you, that is not really my problem either. I don’t ask anyone to pay for anything on this site, I freely give of my time and money to keep it going and to provide good content. I also freely give of my time and money in other ways to make sure survivors can see that there are lots of other people going through the same things they are. If you feel like you are owed something above and beyond that, you might have issues with how you interact with people.

Similarly, the comments here, and on Facebook, are my possession. While I appreciate feedback, those are not the place for you to feel like you can say or do anything you want. If you want that, get your own site. I absolutely reserve the right to remove anything, any time. I try to be fair about it, and generally am pretty laid back about it, I’m also not going to stand for people posting links to things that might be dangerous, or that I simply don’t have time to check for myself to determine whether those are healthy places for survivors to visit. Also, like I said, if the comments are just you posting random things over and over, essentially spamming the site, you don’t get to do that here. Please go do that on your own space.

Today, because of people who don’t seem to understand these kinds of things, I have turned off the ability for anyone other than myself to post items to the Facebook page for this site. I didn’t necessarily want to do that, but I also don’t have time to deal with people who feel like that space is theirs to post any and everything that they want. It’s not, and the last thing I want is someone visiting that page to think that I somehow endorse some of the things people are posting over there, especially when they post links to things that I don’t know about at all. So, it’s been turned off in order to err on the side of caution. Not that I owe you that caution, but it is something I want to do.

That being said, another thing I don’t owe you, is going back and checking links from years old posts. Yes, it’s entirely possible there are links that no longer post to the page that used to be at that location. Welcome to the internet, happens all the time. Anything that is not on this page, is outside of my control, and even if I’m the one linking to it, that does not guarantee the site I linked to is still the same site today. So be cautious, ok?

While we’re on the subject of links, I don’t owe you a link, a mention on Twitter, or publicity for your pet cause just because it might be related to child abuse, and especially if it involves a specific case of alleged child abuse. If I’m not intimately aware of the details of a specific case, I actually have no business talking about it. So if you’re aware of a story of one parent accusing the other of abuse and the police not investigating it, or a case of alleged institutional abuse that is being ignored and all you can do is point me to a page written by the person looking for help, etc. don’t waste your time sending me information about it. I’m not educated enough to take a position, I’m not going to take the time to be educated about it more than likely, and you should spend your time petitioning the people who can actually do something about it instead of random bloggers on the internet. So don’t bother sending me notes, posts, etc. and claiming that my silence means I condone the abuse. My silence means that I don’t know enough to speak intelligently about something, so I don’t. (I know, a novel concept on the internet, but still…)

So, with all that being said, please enjoy the site for what it is, and feel free to contact me, or comment on anything here. I actually do enjoy the community of other survivors, and the interaction I have had with people here. Every once in a while, however, I need to go back and enforce the proper boundaries. Please consider this me setting those boundaries and expectations. Thanks for your attention, and thanks for all the great stuff that folks have shared with me through the years.

Crossposted from my tech blog, and this change has been completed on both this blog, and the News and Reviews blog:

It’s not quite dead yet, but it certainly is on the deathwatch. Given that fact, while I’m not quite pulling the plug on using Feedburner for the RSS feed from this site, or the email subscription to the site, I have switched the sidebar on the blog to use the original WordPress RSS feeds and the built-in WordPress Jetpack email subscription instead of the Feedburner ones. So new subscribers to the feed or the email list, will now be using those services instead of Feedburner, and I’ll be prepared ahead of time for what seems to be the inevitable shuttering of the service.

If you’re a current subscriber to either the Feedburner RSS or Feedburner email list, you may want to update those subscriptions as well. You know, just in case.

You’ll find links to do that on the sidebar, as well as links to follow on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus as well, if you’d rather do that.

Over on my tech blog, I’ve been writing a few posts about the challenges of getting your posts actually viewed by people who have “liked” your Facebook page, and now some more thoughts about adding a page you want to follow more closely to an interest list. That got me thinking about creating, and sharing, a child abuse survivor related interest list over on Facebook.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time right now to try and put that together, however since you can create a public list and share it so others could subscribe to it, I did want to reach out to my readers, and Facebook “likers”, and see if anyone had done that and wanted to share the list in the comments. Let me know if you have done that, especially if you’ve added this blog’s Facebook page to it as well!

A few years ago, I took a look at using Disqus for the comments on my blogs, but ditched the idea because of some technical difficulties. Since the move to using WordPress on the site, I had sort of forgotten my desire to use Disqus and wasn’t exactly unhappy with the comments features within WordPress, but I have been thinking more and more about the advantages of having something like Disqus where I can both have a profile that appears on other sites using Disqus that points back to my “communities”, and allow folks commenting here to also get some recognition. If nothing else, maybe it’ll generate some more discussion, right?

So I pulled the switch on that this past weekend. It’s still a work in progress overall, but the comments should be working now. So if you have a Disqus profile, you can use that and if you don’t, and don’t want one, feel free to comment anyway. I’m still tweaking and trying to figure out why certain things are the way they are, and I expect that the features available there will push me to possibly make some other changes as well. We’ll just have to see how it all works out.

The site always has been sort of a grand experiment for me, why stop experimenting now?

If you follow the News and Reviews blog on this site, you’re already familiar with CBG. I hesitate to refer to him as my co-author, since he really writes more of the posts than I do now, but he’s been contributing TV/Movie/Book reviews and news items relating to child abuse for a few years now, with his own English point of view. With the Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse being hosted here at the end of this week, he wanted to add a little personal story of his own to that, and I think it’d be great to have a additional post of his over here on the main blog, which is where things tend to be a bit more personal. So, with that introduction out of the way, here is CBG’s Blog Carnival contribution:

At the end of 2006 I found this blog. I contacted my local organisation for therapy the week before Christmas and started the first week of January 2007. Even in a country with widespread support for abuse-related therapy like England, this nearly never happens without paying a lot more money than I did. I should’ve bought a lottery ticket at the same time, such was my luck.
So if you’re a male victim of child abuse, perhaps you haven’t stumbled  upon this blog but actually read everything that’s posted without commenting and you still don’t want to get help, ask yourself what multiple of five or ten you want your age to be before you finally address the past (note I did not say “deal with”) which will allow you to get past the abuse perpetrated against you (note I did not say “get over”). It’s great once therapy is over and you can get on with your life, and feel free to live it on your own terms. One tenuous analogy for therapy finishing is that of having smoked your whole life, maybe having enjoyed it too, despite knowing the health issues surrounding it. Then you decide to give up and need to use various therapies, eg  patches for support, but one day you manage it. Healthwise, you will achieve a base level of recovery from having given up smoking but for a non-smoker to try to explain to the person on two packs a day how great they will feel when they give up, compared to how crappy they feel right now? It’s hard to hear, especially if that drug is masking pain.
That’s how it is when you feel ready to end therapy and move on. The image of therapy needs an update from its East Coast American stereotype of the therapist being a close friend that you might go shopping with or someone that could be around milking money out of your for decades instead of a much shorter, issue dependent timespan. Of course, starting therapy is a lot harder depending on your country, where you are mentally and your health system and the cost and time commitment required. A lot of nonsense is talked about therapy which needs clearing up. It is WORK, a fact I almost never read about in books and magazines. Like a real 9-5 paid job, that work will take up time, you will get sick of it and need to take time out from it, but the better therapists will be monitoring how much you can process and guiding you accordingly. It’s not scientific, but I was in therapy for 20% of the time that I didn’t disclose, so five years out of 25 – not week-in, week-out, but that was how long it took to feel like every issue including the single abuse incident had been processed. Steve Bevan of AMSOSA quotes a general average of three years for the service users of his organisation. Of course every survivor’s experiences are different which will cause the length to vary. The sooner therapy begins after abuse ends, the quicker you will move on. In America, college is the last environment where any help on offer might be as close to free as is allowed in a country operating using health insurance but at least the RAINN support line has had its highest profile year last year with former Penn State students raising funds and their current campaign running to the end of April where donations will be matched. As remarked in my introduction, when you contact a therapist, anywhere in the world, you won’t “win the lottery” as I did and start in less than three weeks, you will normally go on a waiting list which can be anything from three months to a year. Whilst you’re waiting for that therapy to become available, you can save up for it but in lieu of therapy what every survivor can aspire to do, is MOVE. Get out of the house, town, city where the abuse happened – if you live on an island, technically get out of the country – and make a new life somewhere else, where you are free of any reminders of places and people. Since human beings aspire to do this as part of life in general, abuse victims just have an added incentive.
So the best thing to do if you haven’t started any kind of therapeutic process is to first, set that date – to start by a certain date or to want to be finished with the first major set of therapy by a certain age. Once you set goals it’s surprising how hard you will fight to achieve them even if you might have to work with others to set them. That’s just a general overview but now it’s up to you. What will signal the need for you to get help and pick up the phone or go online? If you’re underemployed or unemployed due to the recession, shouldn’t your abuse issues be something you can face up to and resolve so that you can hold down the next job? It’s the rest of your life we’re talking about at this blog so I hope you’re able to make the choice to get help – starting right here with the archives of the main blog right here as I did five and a half years ago.