Stories Hidden in Plain Sight
What is sexual abuse and how does it impact every single one of our lives? Part one of a series.
I live in a suburb called Rockrimmon, which sounds so innocent. That name—sorta rocky mountain vibes meets Lord of the Rings—always left me proud and grateful to the city planners of old. And then one day while reading the book of Judges, I found its origin. And it annihilated any affection I’ve held for it.
The last three chapters of Judges make up one long story, which begins and ends with “In those days, Israel had no king” with the final word “Each did as he saw fit.” The story goes that a man acquired a concubine from Bethlehem. A concubine functioned as a sex slave, existing for a man’s sexual pleasure and progeny dreams, but never treated with enough value to be his wife. Okay, right there, we’ve already fallen so far from Eden. Instead of her being his “bone of my hone, flesh of my flesh” equal, he degrades her to sexual property. Not surprising, she gets angry at him and flees to her father. And the man goes to sweet talk her back.
After staying with her father, the man takes her on the trek back home. Along the way they set up camp for the night in a town called Gibeah. But a stranger takes them in because he’s real twitchy about something. Sometime in the night, that something shows up. A band of men come to sexually assault the traveler. Talk about predators prowling in the night. What horrid darkness!
And the story only gets worse. Like throwing raw meat to lions to get them to back off, the owner of the house decides to offer his daughter and the traveler’s concubine to these men to do with them as they wish. That absolutely guts me. After the horror of being raped all night, the concubine stumbles back to the doorstep and dies.
Whew. Let’s take a breath.
Trauma is the unthinkable, the unimaginable, and thereby, the unbearable. There is such a thing as awe for the awful which leaves one speechless for its horror. This is it.
Upon discovering his concubine dead, the traveling man goes into a rage. He divides her body up and sends it to the entire nation of Israel as a judgement against the men of Benjamin. And the entire nation rises up in fury and goes to war. Finally! you think, Finally someone is pissed off enough to care and we may get some justice. And after several battles, they wipe out almost the entire Benjaminite clan. But 600 men survive and flee to a rocky outcropping in the hill country. Wanna guess the name of that rocky place?
The Rock of Rimmon. Or, maybe for short, Rockrimmon.
My suburb is named after a refuge for rapists. Somewhere someone read this story (for morning devotions?) and showed up to a city planning meeting with a “great idea for a name.” And everyone bobbled their heads in agreement. It’s a living metaphor. A horrible story of sexual abuse hiding in plain sight.
I won’t even finish the story in Judges because it goes back off the cliff into some seventh layer of broken masculine sexual hell. It ends where it begins, with even more sex trafficking. No closure. No redemption. The writer leaves us to see how men have failed to rule the earth or even themselves. He wants us in the pain and groaning for redemption.
The Real Story
I want to talk with you about sexual trauma because it impacts every single one of our lives in one way or another. You read that right. You may already know this deeply in your own life because you suffered direct sexual harm and know the wreckage left in its wake. Or you may have no awareness of any sexual harm in your story or the lives of those you love. Trust me, whether aware or not, you know many, many people who has been sexually abused. It’s ubiquitous in our world.
Statistics would say somewhere around 1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men suffer sexual abuse before the age of 18—a massive tragedy in itself. And yet, these statistics are almost guaranteed to be a low estimate. They only cover direct physical sexual molestation and not sexualization in other forms.
Add to this the fact that sexual abuse victims are notoriously silent about their abuse. One study found that for documented cases of abuse (where a social worker had investigated and corroborated the abuse took place), only 64% of girls could admit it happened. For boys, it was much worse, with only 16% able to acknowledge it. That is a staggering reality to me.
Sexual abuse gets hidden in plain sight buried under the thin veneer of a victim’s silence, turned face, deadened eyes, or muted life. You may think, “But if they’re in pain, why don’t they just speak up?” Because traumatic stress takes away our ability to speak in the moment. And afterward, most victims believe their abuse is somehow their fault. None of this may make sense yet but most bury their abuse not simply for the pain but for the shame.
Never Stagnant
But these stories don’t just stay stagnant and dormant in the lives of victims. Like an injury that festers, abuse can go on robbing a victim of two very important things: Relatedness and Aliveness. That pain-shame cocktail can poison a victim with ongoing bouts of isolation and deadness. And though we call it sexual abuse, its impact ripples throughout their lives—spiritual faith, body health, career choices, relationships, etc. Nothing is safe from its shrapnel. The fact that victims go on risking towards love and desire is a testament to their courage and tenacity.
But the bomb blast can travel beyond just the victim. Buried stories of abuse can shape whole communities. Statistics would say 90% of people who perpetrate abuse are known to the victim—a mentor, friend, babysitter, teacher, or family member—someone who has earned the victim’s trust. The idea of a scary anonymous attacker is the minority experience. Abuse happens within families and churches and schools and sports teams and communities. Wherever there is connection, people can abuse those connections for selfish sexual ends.
Think of that: The very places we are made to feel safe and loved become places where victims experience terror and violation. And if abuse is not named and handled well there, it further erodes corporate trust and cripples the whole community’s relatedness and aliveness. And stories are often not handled well. Because abuse starts as a misuse of power, it’s often the power holders that lead the community and get protected most. They can work to bury stories and silence victims, creating a culture that only further fosters abuse.
And so a family may outright deny what a grandfather did because he’s the wealthy patriarch. A charismatic pastor may get all the “grace” because his ministry is “so effective.” A nation’s politicians may hide the Epstein files for decades because they call out the powerful in both parties. And a group of city planners may carelessly name a suburb Rockrimmon. Stories buried in shallow graves.
We Don’t Need To Dig
It may surprise you that I am not proposing we go digging for fossils. As my friend Jan Proett says, digging is rarely a helpful way to approach our stories. We don’t need to hold every person and community in our lives in suspicion and hunt down all the dirt. Why? Because these stories have a way of rising from their graves of silence and showing up to us and our communities. They want to be found. The victims are already talking. Most times these stories are already with us. We just need the right posture and a little skill to welcome them home: Be open. Listen. Be curious. Be kind. This ain’t rocket science.
But because we are so used to these stories being silenced and ignored, I want to arm you with a little awareness and wisdom to recognize a story of abuse in your own life or another’s. So for the next several posts, I will describe how abuse happens (the setup and stages), its impact, and how we heal. This is for your story but also those you live with and love. Healing our stories will benefit us all.
But for now let’s begin with a very basic definition.
What Is Sexual Abuse?
So what even is sexual abuse? Sexual abuse happens anytime someone uses their power over another person for their own sexual gratification without the other person’s consent. Sex was meant to be a gift committed lovers give and receive from each other in the name of love and for the glory of God. Sexual abuse is the dark opposite: stolen selfish sexual gratification driven by sexualized power. The power is just as much the pleasure as anything sexual.
That power may be a difference of physical size or muscle strength. But it could be age or status, as in an older sibling or a more popular school kid. It can be relational power, as in a mentor, a youth pastor, or the step father you looked to for help. It could also be positional power, a boss, a babysitter, the sibling who is more favored in the family. Or it may simply be situational power, as in the person who caught you in a vulnerable moment—when you passed out drunk or when the crowd made you the object of hazing.
Power in itself is not bad. It’s indeed what lets us feel loved. Love is a form of receiving good power as an act of service and care. This is the bind of most sexual abuse: somewhere care suddenly turns cold of love causing deep betrayal.
We often think of sexual absue as involving direct molestation or some sort of physical sexual contact. But sexualization can involve visual contact, as in someone who is a voyeur to you. It may be verbal assault through sexual commentary, conversation, questions, or disclosure (like cat calls or comments on your body, even sex jokes). It could be emotional sexualization as a mother who uses her son to vent about her bad marriage or a youth pastor who flirts with a student to build up his ego.
Even physical sexual contact can be confusing. It could be a teacher that’s too handsy or may involve hugs that linger too long or brief touches of private areas that could pass as accidental but have a pattern to them. It could be a doctor who seemed to be doing his job. It could be a parent who invited you to give a hug or massage but it felt off. Proving sexual intent will drive you mad. It’s a process of pattern observation, reality checking with others, and ultimately trusting your gut, which can be difficult as a victim of abuse, because it’s your body you stop trusting.
And sexual abuse always violates a person’s will—what we call consent. As I wrote in my book, sex in its essence is a form of play, one place where married couples get to play in the name of love. And play, by definition, must always be freely chosen. Play that is forced is not play. Same with sex. Sex requires permission and invitation. Abuse coerces and manipulates around this, violating the will and breaking the rules of sex in its essence.
Let’s be clear: Children cannot fundamentally consent to sexual experience. They simply do not understand the full reality of sexuality in all its nuance nor the implications of sexual experience. They are not even fully sexually developed, with the late stages of puberty continuing into the late teens. To honor this, we’ve drawn a legal line of age 18 for consent.
But we must honor again that no matter the age, consent requires someone’s full informed permission motivated by will and desire. Yes, means yes. Silence does not imply consent. And as we will learn, the absolute wild and tricky part about abuse is that often something is wanted from the person abusing. It could be attention or affection or care or comfort or play or friendship or relationship. Just not abusive sexual experience. No one wants sexual harm.
The Most Important Thing
May I suggest you take another deep breath and tune into to your body as we end. This is heavy stuff. Sexual abuse is a dark evil in our world most especially because it attacks what is most core to us as humans: our capacity for intimacy, sensuality, and play. Sexuality announces like a billboard that we were all made for pleasure and connection. Aliveness and relatedness. Intimacy and adventure. And evil hates that because those things can lead us to love God.
No matter your story, may you feel emboldened to fight for the sacredness of your own wild design, your relatedness and aliveness, and that of those you love.
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Glad you are taking this on as a series Sam! Much needed light on a challenging dark topic.
Love this!