Mindy writes poetry and fiction based in the BDSM world, almost all of it about young girls being brutally ravaged by older men. For Mindy Woods, there is always something beautiful in ruthlessness—it repels and compels her and she writes of cruelty with hapless pleasure. “I even cry about some of the stuff I write,” Mindy said. It’s hard not to see elements of both Mindy and Gretel in the little girls who are tortured in these stories, hard not to see Mindy’s anger and ambivalence toward her daughter as anger at her own young self that allowed the original abuse.
Mindy inhabits a world where choice and helplessness are impossibly blurred. Many of the women I interviewed who were raising children born as a result of rape have emerged from trauma into at least superficially ordinary lives. Others, such as Mindy, remain at the outer margins. Mindy represents the weirdness into which a woman can descend after childhood sexual abuse. Some women are damaged in ways that make them deeply alien. They manifest their scars by vanishing into netherworlds as sordid and disturbing as the events they have survived. Damage has lasting consequences.
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Many parents and children I met who had coped with the obstacles associated with exceptional differences wanted to affirm their positive experiences and stand as models for others. Many had emerged from difficulty as better people and were eager to share their triumphs. By contrast, the mothers of children conceived in rape sought validation. Even if they had built fulfilling parental bonds, their child’s identity had not transformed them. Most children of rape know that; they sense the festering penumbra of loss that shrouds them even before they slip into the world. Someone who does not share the defining condition might disavow the stigma attached to deafness or dwarfism without compunction, but it is almost inconceivable not to be repulsed by rape, and that taint haunts raped women and their rape-conceived children. Who, in this age of genetic determinism, could announce that his father was a rapist and not expect some degree of disquiet to ensue?
Even if being a child of rape may never become a celebrated identity, it may become a more socially accepted one, thanks to the improved educational, legal, and psychological handling of rape in recent decades. The less forbidden a topic rape is and the more easily its survivors can reach one another, the greater the likelihood that mothers and children will find the horizontal communities they need. Even without such support, some women manage to harness their trauma to good parenting—and a few even believe that reckoning with shocking violence has made them better parents than any less fearful history would have done.
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Barbara Schmitz grew up on a farm in northern Nebraska in the 1970s. “My main memories of my childhood are being afraid and being very, very lonely,” she said. Her brother, Jim, and sister, Elaine, were five and seven years older, respectively, and her school had only ten students, just one of them her age. Her mother was violent and unpredictable. “She used to beat Jim with a wooden hanger, and I’d be down at the end of the hallway, feeling helpless. When I got to the age where I could outrun her, she would torture my dog and cat in front of me to make me come back, because she knew that I would rather be beaten myself than have my animals hurt. Even my animals that I loved were used against me.”
Her father was sexually abusive. She remembers his exposing his erect penis to her; other memories are hazier and more sinister. Once Elaine and Jim started high school, she and her father were often alone at home in the afternoons. “My dad had a room in the basement with this creaky, old cot, and I have memories of lying on that cot, knowing the door was locked, and my dad being there. There was a window above my head, and I would picture myself turning into a white bird and flying out through that window.” Her vaginal area was chronically inflamed, and her mother told her to put Chap Stick on it. When Barbara was thirteen, her mother got her a spaghetti-strap dress for a wedding, and Barbara had put it on and was sitting on the kitchen counter, talking to her mother. “My dad got up and went into the bathroom down the hall, and when I looked, he was standing there with an erection. I turned to my mom, and she said, ‘Cover yourself up.’ So my mom knew.”
Barbara recalled getting a particularly bad beating from her mother when she was nine or ten. “I was down on the floor, and she had these orthopedic shoes, and she was kicking my head. I bit her ankle and went running down to the basement, ’cause I knew where my dad kept the pistol. And she came after me. She had fists and this rage on her face. And then she saw the gun, and her face just went from rage to fear. I remember saying, ‘If you come one step closer, I will shoot you.’ She turned around and went back upstairs.” After her mother would beat Barbara, she would make brownies. “That was her way of apologizing,” Barbara remembered. “And if I didn’t eat them, that meant that I didn’t love her. So I got fat. Elaine is very pretty and thin and always had the new clothes, and I was always wearing the hand-me-downs. My mom dressed her up and let her be a cheerleader and in Girl Scouts. But Elaine was nice to me; the few times I remember being tucked into bed and hugged, it was Elaine who did it.”
Barbara’s best friend was her border collie, Pumpkin. Her father would make her beat the animal with a whip, and when Pumpkin had puppies, when Barbara was nine, he put them in a gunnysack with a brick and threw them in the creek. Barbara used to climb the hill behind the house and seek out tranquillity and peace. “I would talk to God a lot,” she recalled. “I’d be like, ‘Why are you letting this happen to me?’ I was pissed at Him for a long time.”
She remembers herself as “a mean little kid” who would cut off her dolls’ heads and kick her older sister for no reason. “It was okay to be angry in my family. It was not okay to cry.” When she started to weep after spraining her ankle as a teenager, her father slapped her repeatedly, telling her to shut up. Barbara longed for approval. “You know how a dog would rather be beaten, just to get attention that way, than be ignored?” So she started lifting fifty-pound bags of seed corn and doing other heavy farm chores; by way of reward, her father taught her how to play poker and how to fish.
Barbara finally escaped by going to college in Lincoln. During rush week for fraternity and sorority candidates, Barbara went to a big party, and a guy who seemed nice invited her over to see his frat house. He got her drunk on beer. “The next thing I remember, I was on the bed and being raped,” she said. “I remember screaming, ‘No!’ and trying to fight. But I was still very drunk, and he was very strong. I still had my hymen, so there was lots of blood.” As soon as he got off her, she crawled into the bathroom and locked the door; when she came out, he handed her $5. Back at her dorm, she took a three-hour hot shower and then stayed in bed for two days.
In the aftermath, her new life at college quickly began to fall apart. She became bulimic, using food to stifle her pain, just as she had been taught to do as a child. She began binge drinking and stopped going to classes. A few months later, she met Jeffrey, a friend of her roommate’s boyfriend. “Our relationship very quickly became about sex,” she said. “It was not tender or emotional or even pleasurable for me.” But it did help her begin to function again, and she and Jeffrey graduated together. “It was like, ‘Okay, what do you want to do now?’” So they got married. “I chose Jeffrey because he was emotionally distant,” she said.
They moved to Omaha and threw themselves into their careers; Barbara worked seventy-five hours a week. “It was a great way to avoid going home, because there was nothing to go home for,” she said. She told her doctor that her energy was flagging, and he prescribed an antidepressant. It helped her be more engaged and energetic, but she resumed binge drinking, which dulled her intense anxiety. Even though she was terrified of intimacy, she was also starved for affection, so she started casting about extramaritally. She met someone in an online sex chat room who was a born-again Christian. “He talked so much about love, and things that were very new to me,” she recalled. “He opened the door for me to accepting Christ—which is odd, from a sex chat room. After that, there was always th
e sense that God was there somewhere.” One evening, she went into the bathroom and started to cry. “I got down on my knees, and I said, ‘Please, before I die, just let me know what real love is.’”
When Dan O’Brien came into her life not long afterward, she thought he was the answer to that prayer. She had a new job for a big agricultural corporation, running support for a sales team in the Pacific Northwest. She’d stay at work an extra hour to accommodate the time difference, and Dan, one of her long-distance clients, started calling her at the end of the day. He was fighting for custody of his three-year-old son and would send Barbara photos of the boy and ask for advice. “He was also asking me a lot of really personal questions. A lot of ‘Why are you there so late? Why aren’t you going home to your husband? Do you guys even sleep together anymore?’”
Barbara thought she had finally found her prince. She told Jeffrey all about him, and while her husband resented the new attachment, by then they were living such separate lives that he couldn’t exercise much authority. Barbara and Dan would talk to each other for hours every night. “Dan was basically my dad, all over again,” Barbara said, “but Dan was telling me how smart I was and feeding my ego. He loved me; he wanted to marry me; he wanted to have children with me. He would have moved to Omaha, but he had a little boy, so I needed to move to California. Now, keep in mind: we had never met each other.”
She finally told Jeffrey that she was going out West to see Dan, and Jeffrey drove her to the airport. “The reality, of course, could not live up to my huge fantasy,” she recalled. “I felt very much out of place, almost like I was watching myself in this play.” They slept together right off the bat, using condoms, and although she still found no pleasure in sex, everything was relatively normal until they had an argument. “He grabbed me and threw me down, literally ripped off my clothes, and was inside of me before I even realized what was going on. What he was doing hurt. Afterwards, he said, ‘Didn’t you like that?’ and went into the living room to watch TV.”
Barbara didn’t initially admit to herself that she’d been raped, but she felt as though her world were dissolving around her. She called Jeffrey and said she was coming home. In Omaha, she tried to pretend that nothing had happened, but when she found out that she was pregnant, she called Dan and told him, still half thinking that they might embark on a new life together. He accused her of getting pregnant so he would marry her. She didn’t seriously consider an abortion: “I didn’t think the child was real enough to even consider an abortion.” Instead, she simply told her husband, “We’re pregnant.” They hadn’t had sex in months, but Jeffrey was in denial as much as she was, and he accepted the fiction.
Barbara’s life became increasingly surreal. Dan threatened her because he was worried that she would hound him for child support. Jeffrey played the role of the dutiful expectant father, going to Lamaze class and getting her Arby’s in the middle of the night when she craved potato cakes. “But there was no love there,” Barbara recalled. “I was working during the day, going through the motions. At night, I was lying on the bathroom floor crying and asking God to kill me.” She didn’t fully register that she was going to have a baby until she was in the delivery room. “And when I saw Pauline, it was just like ‘Holy shit, there’s a baby!’”
Maternal feelings did not set in. Barbara breast-fed and took care of her daughter, but she did so without love. “She was adorable, but when I looked at her, I saw Dan. I just wanted to die.” One of her friends, who worked in a therapist’s office, recognized that Barbara was in terrible shape and made a counseling appointment on her behalf; Barbara didn’t have the energy to say no. Three months into therapy, Barbara read a book about boundaries. “There I am, right on page eight. This woman in her thirties was talking about things that her father would do. Such as come into the bathroom when she was in there naked, or urinate in front of her. And it said that was ‘covert sexual abuse.’ My entire life, I sensed that there was something really wrong with me. I suddenly saw that it was something that was done to me, that I couldn’t help, and that’s why I’m this way. I went and woke up Jeffrey and had him read that. He looked right at me and said, ‘I always knew something had to have happened.’”
Barbara and her therapist began to talk about Barbara’s childhood, and then about Dan, and Barbara finally identified what had happened to her as rape. She finally started to feel angry at Dan, and the angrier she grew, the more fiercely she began to love Pauline. “I’d be nursing her, and I’d just cry because she’d come from this horrible thing, but she was just so beautiful.” The next step was to admit Pauline’s parentage to Jeffrey. Jeffrey replied, “There’s a part of me that wants to kick you out and never see you again, but that’s not what I really want. So let’s work this out.” They entered marriage counseling, and later, he started individual therapy. Once he understood on an intellectual level how the relationship with Dan could have happened, he made peace with it and took responsibility for his part in their hollow marriage.
Jeffrey admitted to me that the outcome would have been different if he’d known from the start it was Dan’s baby. “But Pauline was six months old before I found out,” Jeffrey said, “and I already loved her. She was mine, whatever the biology was, and I couldn’t give her up. That helped me to see that I really loved Barbara, too.” Barbara, in turn, watching him snuggling with Pauline, “started to see the truth about Jeffrey—that he was so much better than I’d known—and the truth about Dan, that he was so much worse.”
Barbara’s parents found out that Dan was Pauline’s father because Dan had his girlfriend call them. At the farm for Christmas, Barbara and Jeffrey were sitting in the living room one night, holding Pauline, when Barbara’s mother suddenly asked, “Was I good to you when you were growing up?” Barbara said, “No, you weren’t.” Her mother said, “I hit you once, and you deserved it.” Then she told them to leave the farm and warned Barbara that if she ever returned she’d put a bullet through her head. A year later, Barbara’s father sent her a card with a picture of her sitting on his lap. He wrote, “I’m really going to miss seeing Pauline grow up.” Later, he called and said, “If you don’t stop talking about how I sexually abused you, I’m going to kill you.” But Barbara had already made the quiet passage to activism, which is incompatible with secrecy. She gave an interview to a local newspaper; she had her picture taken for inclusion in a project about women who have been raped and abused. Eventually, she testified in front of the Nebraska legislature and helped to get a law passed to abolish the statute of limitations for sex offenders.
When I visited Barbara and Jeffrey in Omaha, Pauline was six; she struck me as a cheerful little girl, easy to talk to, and cuddly with both parents. She wanted their attention, but seemed content to explore and return. “I never got the basics about love or even kindness,” Barbara said. “It’s like beginning a whole new language when you’re forty: it’s a lot harder than if you’ve heard people speaking it since you were a kid.” She shuddered. “One time I gave her a hard swat, and the look on her face was devastating. That was enough to know, ‘Okay, I’m never doing that again.’ I don’t want to turn into my parents.”
Barbara has built a happy family on the ruins of a dysfunctional one. At the time of our initial conversation, she and Jeffrey had been married eighteen years. She was learning new social skills alongside her daughter. “I used to always wait for people to come up to me,” she said. Then she started initiating contact, and teaching Pauline to do the same. “I’d say, ‘What would be a good way to make a friend, do you think?’ I’d take her to the park and practice. As we were parenting her, I was parenting myself. I had reached the point in my life where I had to start living as a real person, or I just didn’t want to live. I mean, I gave Pauline life, but, in so many ways, she gave it to me. Pauline has the freedom to think for herself. I had some freedom, too, and I had a choice, too. I could have been my mother, and instead I decided to heal myself. My heart is very heavy for my whole f
amily—even my dad. They’re not bad people, really.” She remembered the plea she’d made to God on her knees in the bathroom, years earlier, to know love before she died. “I thought that Dan was the answer to that prayer,” she said. “But now I see that Pauline is the answer. Pauline was also the instrument. I opened my heart up to God first, then Pauline, then Jeffrey. Then I just thought, ‘Okay, who’s next?’”
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Rape-derived pregnancy has come under specific scrutiny in the context of genocidal rape. If one’s goal were to extirpate a race, one might imagine that the most appropriate tactic would be forced sterilization. In many armed conflicts, however, the conquerors impregnate the conquered race, who perforce deliver babies to the victors. This pervasive phenomenon is called forced pregnancy. A report from the War and Children Identity Project estimates some half a million people living now were so conceived. The British psychiatrist Ruth Seifert wrote, “The rape of women communicates from man to man, so to speak, that the men around the women in question are not able to protect ‘their’ women.” Susan Brownmiller describes this full-scale invasion of women’s bodies as “an extracurricular battlefield.” There is a huge difference between these cases and the pregnancies through rape that occur in peacetime in the developed world, where being pregnant doesn’t get you killed, doesn’t mean you will be banned from your community, doesn’t make you unmarriageable. In the West, one can hide a child’s origins; one can give him up for adoption. Women who acknowledge and keep these children can often find men won’t care where their child came from. The ethnic issues in many conflict zones, however, leave women pregnant from rape with no way to hide their story. The family knows; the community knows; there is no continuity with their previous life.
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