Invisible Girls

by Patti Feuereisen

  What we do know is that brothers (and sometimes sisters) do sometimes sexually abuse their (usually) younger siblings and that many of you reading this book will have had this experience. This chapter is for you. (While foster-care abuse is obviously a very important issue, this book is focused on invisible girls, girls whose stories aren’t being told, so we’ll be examining biological and stepsibling abuse.)

  First, let’s define terms. Sibling sexual abuse means any inappropriate touching or other sexual behavior between siblings. Being fondled, having your private parts touched or being forced to touch someone else’s, being made to watch someone masturbate, being penetrated, being asked to view pornographic materials, being repeatedly walked in on in the bathroom or bedroom—these are all forms of sexual abuse. Any child over six can be an abuser; the abused can be as young as two or three.

  Sometimes sibling abuse goes on for years. In his book Sibling Abuse, Vernon Wiehe devotes a short chapter to sexual abuse—short, in part, because reliable information is so hard to come by. As Wiehe points out, it is far easier to track emotional and physical abuse between siblings than it is to track sexual abuse. Sexual abuse between siblings is usually kept hidden either because there’s so much shame or because there’s confusion about what it is and why it is allowed to go on.

  Just as with father-daughter incest, in families where there is sibling incest, there is always some problem with weak parenting. Girls will often say they didn’t have the necessary closeness with a parent to tell them what was happening. You may occasionally hear about a single incident where a brother tried to molest his sister but got caught and punished. Sure, that happens—but it’s rare. One of my clients told me of her mother walking in the room while her brother was molesting her. His pants were open, and he was holding his sister’s hand on his penis. Her mother looked in, saw them on her bed, and then shut the door. Later that evening she blamed her daughter and told her that she was bad and dirty for “doing stuff” with her brother. She was nine years old and her brother was sixteen. Often, there’s a long pattern of sibling sexual abuse within the home, and the parents are either oblivious or dismissive. And girls are left feeling totally trapped and confused.

  Many teen girls feel tremendous guilt and shame about “letting” their brothers “get away with it”; younger girls will tend to have more fears. In all cases, it is safe to say that the parents weren’t present in some important way. Again, it is never the survivors fault!

  TOPAZ

  I met Topaz when she was sixteen. It was her aunt who brought us together. I was speaking about incest and sex abuse at a local high school when one of the social workers approached me to tell me about her niece. She began to sob as she spoke of the guilt she felt about not protecting her niece from her nephew. “Why couldn’t I see it?” she choked out, tears streaming down her face. She went on to explain that her niece had just been released from a two-month hospitalization for a suicide attempt by overdose. During her stay, she revealed that she had been sexually abused by her older brother for four years.

  As I would later discover in sessions with Topaz, the abuse began when she was ten. She and her brother lived alone with their mother in an affluent New York suburb. Their mother worked long hours in Manhattan and was rarely around. They were Italian American. Both children attended private school and were good students, although John, Topaz’s brother, had started getting into trouble for cutting classes in junior high. When he hit high school, he started drinking and staying out late. Most of the time he seemed to be seething inside.

  Topaz, by contrast, was sweet and outgoing. She was in the Model UN at school, was very social, and had many girlfriends. Topaz was the type of girl you could count on. She could keep her friends’ secrets, she could always be relied on for school projects, and she came through for friends, teachers, and family.

  One day after school, when she was fifteen, Topaz came home and swallowed what remained of a bottle of Tylenol. As she began to fall asleep, she realized she did not want to die. She managed to get to the phone to call her best friend and tell her what she had done. Her best friend and her best friend’s mom raced over and took Topaz to the emergency room. The hospital contacted Topaz’s mom, and she showed up at the hospital within the hour. That’s when Pandora’s box burst open.

  TOPAZ’S STORY

  My Aunt Saved My Life

  I am sixteen years old and have been in therapy (with Patti) for about a year. For a while I could keep everything together, at least on the outside, but then I crashed. I think that crash saved my life. Pretty ironic that it took an overdose to save me.

  My brother and I live in a very affluent area of Westchester County, New York. Our parents got divorced when we were very young. We barely ever saw our dad when we were young, and now we never see him. He moved to London and has a new family. Our mom is something of a workaholic. She is an investment banker and keeps very long hours. My brother and I have always had au pairs or nannies taking care of us.

  When my brother got to be a teenager, we all agreed that we could be on our own for the most part and no longer needed live-in help. So from then on—I was ten and he was about thirteen—we would only have babysitters from the time we got home from school until our mother came home at around 8 P.M. That’s when things started to get weird with my brother. My mother’s room is on the ground floor, and ours are upstairs. Once we would go up to bed, she would go into her home office, also on the ground floor, and do more work. She had no idea what was going on.

  My brother and I were very different. I always wanted to be perfect. I wanted to do really well in school, never make waves with my friends, and keep my mom happy. My brother and I never really talked about anything deep, but we did hang out a lot and played soccer together and also talked about music. He was usually pissed off about something or at someone, but he was pretty nice to me. I think that’s what was so confusing about the whole thing.

  Now a bit about my mom. She has always been super-ambitious, but when she met my father she decided to stop working and have kids. When my brother was little, she spent a lot of time with him, and then I was born when my brother was three. My mom continued to stay home with us until I turned three and my brother was six. That’s when my father announced that he was moving out with his secretary. Because I was such a little kid, I really don’t know much more about it than that. All I know is that my mother started working again and my world changed. I realize now that my mother became much more emotionally remote when my father left; she wasn’t there for me even when she was home. I think it really wasn’t her work so much as her depression.

  I was really lonely and leaned on my brother for “kid” companionship. We had our babysitters and they were nice, but I still felt lonely. My mother would work long hours and then come home and read or do more work-related projects, but she didn’t really talk to us or spend any time with us. I was craving love and attention and affection at that time.

  Once I got a little older and started doing really well in middle school, she started paying some attention to me. She liked to help me with my schoolwork and projects and would tell me how proud she was of my good grades. Even though we didn’t talk about a lot of personal things or really connect, that was the only time I can remember my mother focusing on me. It wasn’t predictable or anything, but I did enjoy it. Until high school, I was still very much a pleaser.

  My brother was much more daring and independent. He always did well in school, but he wouldn’t give my mom the time of day, especially as he got to be a teenager. He was always off either with his friends or playing soccer.

  By the time I was a teenager, I started realizing how much my mom was not there for me, and I started to reject her. I was really pissed off. She did not fight it, and the three of us kind of led parallel lives. Except at night. That is when my brother and I would have sexual contact.

  It all started when I was about ten. One day my brother, who was thirteen at the time, brought me
over to the neighbor’s to play soccer. Our neighbor was a very “cool” seventeen-year-old. His parents were never around, and, as it turns out, he and my brother were hooking up, but I didn’t know it at the time. They told me to come inside for some cookies, and then they both asked me to watch them play a game. Up to that point, I was having a great time. Well, it turned out that the game was that the neighbor would jerk off my brother and then my brother would jerk him off. I froze—I was shocked and scared. I didn’t know what to do. I sat there and ate my cookies and looked down, and didn’t say a word. I avoided the neighbor after that.

  That night when I was in bed, my brother snuck into my room. He said, “Hey, what Josh and I did is really fun. I want to teach you how to do it, too.” I told him I didn’t want to and that it kind of grossed me out. He said okay and left.

  Then, about a week later, my mom and brother had a huge fight. He came into my room crying, and I felt really bad for him. He told me he felt really unloved and asked if he could just sleep in my bed with me. I said okay. I was a little nervous, but nothing happened. He actually did this a number of times over the next few months, just come in and sleep in my bed. My mom didn’t seem to notice.

  My brother really seemed sad and would tell me that I was the only one who really loved him. But he never touched me or anything. He also stopped hanging out with our neighbor. And I started liking the warmth of another body in my bed with me.

  After about six months of this, things changed. One night I was dozing off, and I felt my brother begin to rub up against me. I did not know what was going on, but I just pretended to be asleep. He started doing more and more stuff to me, and I just kept pretending to be asleep. He put my hands on his genitals, and then he touched me. I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t have anyone to talk to. My brother and I never talked about it, and I never told.

  The weird thing is, it would go on for a few weeks and then not for months, and then it would start up again. When I was about twelve, I hit puberty and got my period. This may sound really strange, but that’s when I started to like how it felt when my brother touched me. We never had intercourse or anything, but we would touch each other in very sexual ways and my body would feel really good. This was probably the most confusing time in my life. As much as my body was reacting, in my mind I knew it was gross, it was wrong, and yet I didn’t stop it. I started to have irritable bowel syndrome, where I couldn’t go to the bathroom for days on end. Now I realize it was because I was holding in so many of my feelings, but at the time it just felt awful.

  The stuff with my brother continued on and off for the next two years. Then one day it just stopped. My brother got serious with a girlfriend, and he never came to me again. After a few months of my brother not approaching me, I actually started to relax a little, and my stomach problems were less intense.

  When I was fifteen he went off to college. That’s when I started thinking about the incest a lot. I feared that what I had done was disgusting and wrong and that somehow everyone knew I had liked it. I felt terribly ashamed, but I really missed my brother. So I kept really busy. Honestly, I don’t know how my mother couldn’t have noticed that something was wrong.

  I did try to have boyfriends. Of course, most of them just wanted to hook up, without any relationship, but after what had happened with my brother, that felt natural to me. I just kept finding new boys to hook up with, and I started to get a strange reputation in my school. I was seen as this really nice girl and good student and not really a slut, but a girl who would not say no to guys.

  Of course, no one knew how totally depressed I was. One day I couldn’t take it anymore and decided I wanted all my feelings to end, so I took a bottle of Tylenol. But once I started to feel drowsy, I got scared and called my best friend, whose mom I also really trusted. Thank goodness they were home. They took me to the hospital, and my stomach was pumped. I was so tired from coming off the Tylenol that I didn’t have the energy to lie, and when my best friend asked me why I had done it, I could not stop crying. I told her all about my brother sexually abusing me. I just spilled everything out.

  My mother, my aunt, and my best friend’s mom were also all in the room, and everyone freaked out.

  As soon as I told, I regretted it. I shut down and refused to talk about it anymore. But my mother made me see a counselor. I didn’t want to talk about it and I didn’t trust the counselor, and things just got worse. I was so depressed that I stopped focusing on school and just slept a lot. Then I was hospitalized. They put me in a ward with other adolescents who had problems—eating disorders, depression, sexual abuse—and I began to talk with other kids about what had happened.

  The family therapist made my brother come to a session where I had to tell him how upset I was with him for doing what he’d done. It was in that session that my brother broke down and admitted that the neighbor had sexually abused him starting when he was about ten and the boy was thirteen. By the time my brother was twelve, it had become habitual. He said his abusing me was his way out and away from the neighbor. It really confused me seeing my brother break down like that. I was finally angry and it felt good, but, when my brother started crying, I actually felt sorry for him, and that put me in a strange place.

  When I finally got out of the hospital, the kids at school had a lot of questions. It was really hard. My mother also got into therapy, and it came out that she had been abused by her uncle when she was a little girl and had never told anyone about it. She started to realize that a part of her was so terrified that I could be abused that she had just closed off her feelings. This is very sad, because it turns out that the cycle of abuse continued, both with my brother and with me.

  Needless to say, there was a lot of pain around our house. My mother told me how sorry she was for not being a part of my life, but she continued to work long hours and still wasn’t really there for me.

  Then my aunt told me about a therapist, Dr. Patti, she had heard speak at her school about sex abuse. My aunt brought me to my first session with Dr. Patti. I joined the survivors’ group, and that’s what really began my healing. I was filled with shame and conflicting feelings, and I had to forgive myself big time. The group supported my anger toward my brother. I still can’t really imagine ever forgiving my brother. I do not feel any pity for him. As a matter of fact, I’m still really pissed off at him. I am also really angry at my mom. The one person who really came through for me was my aunt. I moved in with her after the hospitalization, and that probably saved my life—at least my emotional life—because she told me again and again that it wasn’t my fault, what happened with my brother. She reminded me that my brother and I were just confused and scared.

  It’s funny, but although my aunt was never all that involved in my family before, she feels the worst. She tells me over and over again how sorry she is that she didn’t figure out what was happening and do something. I think she takes it especially hard because she’s a social worker who works with teens and thinks she should have known somehow. I know she feels really guilty, but I always ask her how she could have known. I remind her that I wore many masks: the good girl, the good student, the happy kid, the sister who loved her brother. It’s that last mask that still confuses me the most.

  MY THOUGHTS

  Topaz was a very lonely kid. Her mom wasn’t around much, and her brother was her only real companion. She was comforted by having him sleep next to her in a home where she felt little closeness and comfort from adults. We can actually see a lot of parallels between Topaz’s story and Coral’s and Garnet’s. Like Topaz, both Coral and Garnet wanted their mothers’ support but never got it. We know that Garnet’s mother suffered abuse, and so did Topaz’s. These mothers weren’t close enough to their daughters to intuit the abuse. And Topaz’s mother was ignorant of what was happening not only with her daughter but also with her son. All three girls were left on their own at a critical time.

  Of course, we also see how sexual abuse and incest cycles through families. It
turns out that Topaz’s brother felt deeply rejected by his father leaving. Then, when his mother started working after having been pretty accessible to him during the first six years of his life, the feeling of rejection and aloneness intensified. When he was just ten years old, his thirteen-year-old neighbor started paying attention to him, and he craved that attention. Unfortunately, the attention was sexual and totally inappropriate. Topaz’s brother revealed in family therapy that the neighbor was also being abused—by his coach. Her brother wanted to break away from the abuser but did not know how. Plus, he continued to get something important from the connection that he wasn’t getting anywhere else. It’s a pattern we see often: many boys who are abused turn around and abuse someone else. It is interesting that girls who are abused usually turn out to be massively protective of children.

  In family therapy, Topaz’s brother talked about how, as an adolescent, he was terrified of being gay and he was afraid of girls, so his sister seemed like his least threatening choice. When a girl his age finally showed some interest in him, he no longer needed to sexualize his sister.

  The thing that was so confusing for Topaz was that she enjoyed the physical sensations, and that made her ambivalent about stopping him and ashamed when she didn’t. The fact is, our bodies are conditioned to respond to sexual touch. But most important to note is that, in most incest situations, the abuser sweetens up the abused first, and this is precisely what Topaz’s brother did. By coming to her crying, by wanting to cuddle with and sleep with her, especially when she too was feeling vulnerable and lonely, he gained her trust. This was very confusing. Because Topaz was such a pleaser, she felt sorry for her brother and wanted to make things okay. But it wasn’t okay. Her brother knew how and where to touch her to arouse her, and she felt confused by her body. Girls of this age will often say they felt “deceived” by their bodies. No matter how they might be feeling—angry, upset, sad—their bodies are still aroused. That’s why girls who have been abused will often hook up with lots of other boys—just for some of those familiar feelings of being touched. Another reason sexual abuse survivors may hook up with boys is because they think that’s all they’re worth. That’s what they’ve been taught.