BBC Football Story
Following the publication of the report into historical child sexual abuse and exploitation in English football, the BBC has a three part documentary.
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Sharing – How Trauma Changes The Brain, According To Experts
I think this says a lot about the things we hear about survivors often. Their testimonies are riddled with muddled memories, they have a hard time not being hyper-alert all of the time, and they can often have difficulty with mood swings, and emotional outbursts.
I think it’s also important to recognize that for the last year, many of us have also been living with various amounts of trauma. COVID-19, racial and gender violence, political violence, etc, just to name a few things that we’ve all been exposed to in overwhelming fashion, and that trauma is having an impact on our brains, as we speak.
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Sharing – Resiliency: Strong & Broken At The Same Time
I see so many survivors stuck in a black/white perception. You’re either healed, or broken. You are strong and resilient, or you’re weak. You have a mental health problem, or you don’t.
When the truth is so much more complicated than all of that.
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Sharing – I’m Open About My Depression—But Not Completely
As I have written before, being an advocate online for me means writing, sharing information and insights, interacting with other survivors, etc. but sometimes I just can’t. Not because I’ve lost interest or don’t want to do it, but because I’m just tired of the pushback. I’m tired of having stories about male victims challenged or dismissed, tired of people in the mental health space telling me that everyone should just do what worked for them, tired of dealing with other people’s definitions of what healing looks like, or how long it should take, and on and on.
It’s all stigma, it’s all the stigma that I want to fight against, but some days it’s just exhausting. So I’d rather not talk about it.
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Sharing – Sexual violence against boys is far more common than we think
These are the stories we don’t hear about often enough, and that leaves a whole lot of victims out on their own when it comes to finding support.
“What do you think you know about boys and sexual violence? I thought I knew that boys are victims only rarely, and I automatically equated “child sexual abuse” with adults preying on kids. But I was wrong on both counts.
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Underscoring the Fact That The Abuser is Normally Someone Already Known to Kids
By now, I would hope that most of my readers know that most abuse is not a result of strangers abducting children, but something much closer to home. Abusers are mostly people known to kids, and to families. The reason the child abduction cases garner so much attention when they happen is because they are…
