Far From the Tree: continued

This post is dedicated to but one chapter. One heavy, heavy, chapter.

"More than any other parents coping with exceptional children, women with rape-conceived children are trying to quell the darkness within themselves in order to give their progeny light." These stories offer a perspective on humanity few other tales of life can in exhibiting both the light and the dark in equal intensity.

"The children described in the rest of this book sustain injuries; these children, through no fault of their own, are injuries."

As most of you know, I am a scholar of psychology. Particularly, I am interested in rape and other forms of sexual assault. My research is aimed at preventing these acts, my clinical work towards treating women (and sometimes men) who have suffered, and my teaching is about a mix of the above with a few other things thrown in. So, I talk about rape a lot. Sometimes the tone I use offends people because, let's face it, I get habituated. It's not that I don't care it's that it doesn't hold the taboo for me anymore and I perhaps speak with less hesitation than the normal person and this comes off as callous. But I do care, most deeply. For me this is the perfect little intersection of issues I care about: clinical psychology and women's rights.

Given this background I was very intellectually excited to read the chapter on Rape in Far From the Tree. Rarely do popular non-fiction books cover this topic in a depth that appeals to me. And I don't know as much about women who have had children because of rape, this is a topic on which there is very little information. Little did I know how difficult it would be to read this chapter!

In many ways, I had to force myself to read this chapter. It stabbed little holes in my skin emotionally while I read it. This surprised me a bit, I thought since I am so familiar with this topic it wouldn't get to me much. I was wrong I think, for two main reasons. One reason is I underestimated how much I do care about psychotherapy treatment ( I do more research than treatment generally) from a justice perspective. One thing that really tore me up reading this was reading about all the crappy therapists these poor women had been too. OH MY LORD. I cannot fully describe my anger while reading these passages. Because I DO know how to treat posttraumatic stress disorder. Most people with posttraumatic stress disorder deal with it untreated for an average of TWELVE YEARS before seeking help. And then, these poor women fell onto these bozo therapists? Perhaps they were somewhat helpful but it statistically very unlikely they "cured" them or alleviated their symptoms as significantly as they could have if they followed empirically supported treatment protocols. LIKE I WOULD. So this really got to me, knowing how many women (people) are out there who are not getting the treatment they deserve.

It was also just overwhelmingly sad to read these stories of many of these women, for whom having a child because of rape was just another injustice. We tend to think of having a child because of rape as "an exception" and something so horrible as to cause us to grant exceptions to our norms (e.g., abortion laws). Yet, for many of the women described in this chapter it was just another awful thing. For some though, it was the final injustice that propelled them towards a different way of living, living with love for their child. It's truly amazing the way different mothers dealt with this circumstance, though it seems a little silly to call a child a circumstance. I found the mothers in the US just as moving as the mothers in Rwanda, though their horrors seemed slightly different, when things are that horrible is there a point to making gradations in the horror? Seems unnecessary to me.

Still a great book. A great chapter too, though I don't think I will assign it in my Abnormal Psychology class like I planned, too much. As much as reading about trauma may make one wonder about the status of the world it actually usually makes me a bit hopeful. If we can live through all that we can do about anything. But we need to work out the details.