Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  I remember, too, going to the tuckshop and observing the other mothers, the Leave It to Beaver mothers, volunteering there. I remember wishing I had that kind of mother. A housewife mother, a TV mother, a mother devoted to her children, a mother who had no visible self, a mother who in demonstrating her devotion by working in the tuckshop would elevate my status in the schoolyard as a Very Loved Daughter, as special. It strikes me as both terrible and frightening that, in just a few short years on earth, I had already been culturally indoctrinated into at some level wanting a Stepford wife as a mother. But there it is. I wanted parents who came to parent–teacher nights (not altogether unreasonable). I wanted to be Lisa who lived round the corner, whose dad just adored her. I thought she was a living doll and I was green with wistful, self-loathing envy. I hated my weird name and sometimes I tried to pass as a Lisa or a Debbie, but my not-quite-like-the-other-childrenness seeped through and sooner or later everyone knew I was not Cindy Brady. Meanwhile, my mother matured and perfected her make-up, all provincial desire, a restless, discontented storm in a B-cup.

  I want to think things have changed, that schools are more sympathetic to troubled kids now than they were back in the 1960s. I assume children chronically traumatised at home or by world events (refugee children, for example) are more likely to be met by caring staff who have some understanding of trauma and its tell-tale signs. Many teachers are busy doing a tough job well, and there is growing awareness in the education sector as to the prevalence of trauma. Some schools make concerted efforts to understand the effects of trauma and to explore how the school community can best support affected students. But that’s no guarantee a child, already traumatised or not, won’t be traumatised at school.

  Deanne spends her days travelling around schools in Victoria, delivering comprehensive and progressive sexuality education programs. She says she has seen teachers grab children by the arm and drag them across the room, seen them bully the bullied child. She’s encountered ‘clip’ systems – endorsed by the Department of Education – where a list of behaviours, rewards and punishments are positioned at the front of the classroom, and children’s names are moved from one category to another depending on whether they are disruptive or not. It’s an improvement on having one’s bare butt cheeks publicly slapped, but still.

  ‘Teachers have an incredible privilege of being with students for six hours a day,’ says Deanne. ‘A teacher who practises positive, mindful leadership can be of emotional benefit to all students but particularly those with trauma backgrounds or unsupportive home lives. Conversely, teachers who use shaming or bullying techniques to control their cohort can compound distress already experienced by some children.’ One principal she spoke to informally estimated the number of students who experience trauma to be around 40 per cent. Aside from pressing concerns about the harmful potential of teachers’ behaviours, and questions around how teachers manage already troubled students, there is also the matter of how trauma is enacted or transmitted child to child, which happens most often by way of bullying.

  Few children schooled in the western world escape experiencing or witnessing bullying. When we think of bullying we think of the traditional scenario: a bigger boy beating up a smaller boy, or the infliction of a ‘hazing’ initiation rite on a terrified newcomer. We think of boys and we think of the body, or of persistent schoolyard name-calling. We know girls can bully, and most of us recall the ‘tough girls’ of our childhood, but they were a rarity, an aberration of girlhood. In recent years, there has been an increased focus on the complexities of a girl culture that thrives in the corridors and toilets of schools. Movies such as Heathers and Mean Girls helped bring the dark side of this secret society to mainstream attention, and revealed it as a breeding ground for a kind of bullying that often evades notice and official consequence.

  Dr Ken Rigby from the University of South Australia defines bullying as repeated aggression in which there is an imbalance of power, but while male aggression is usually easy to see, often manifesting in physical assault or intimidation or overt verbal abuse, bullying among female students can be harder to recognise because of its tendency towards psychological mind-games. During our years together at Annandale North Public School, between the ages of six and eight, Emma was relentlessly bullied at school by a freckled strawberry blonde called Cheryl who became our sworn enemy, and over the duration of my schooling I copped my fair share of bullying, but did not suffer any protracted or severe victimisation. I suspect I got off rather lightly. In any event, I want to focus here on my bullying behaviour because the queue of victims is always much longer than the queue of perpetrators, which begs the question of who can possibly be doing all the perpetrating.

  Some years ago I received an email from an old school friend of ours, whom I’ll refer to as Tom C. Tom had come across some writing of mine and managed to track me down. I had no recollection of him so I asked if he had been among the boys I’d claimed as a boyfriend. He wrote back saying that yes, Emma and I had once given him a heart-shaped cushion with We Love You Tom sewn on it, along with a series of gushing notes. He admitted the lingering sentiment of first love was the reason he’d decided to get in touch. I was seized by concern that the gift he had taken as praise might have been one of our mocking pranks and, wracked with guilt, I phoned Emma. She reassured me that Tom C. had not been the butt of a joke – we really did like him. We liked him so much we trapped him in my bedroom and forced him to kiss us, attacking him with hairspray and lipstick at any sign of resistance. I mentioned this to him in an email and jokingly offered to pay his therapy bills, but moments after I sent the message Emma phoned to say that it wasn’t Tom we had set upon with the hair product after all. Rather, it was another boy we regularly victimised, who hangs on the blurry edges of my memory. According to the Australian Human Rights Commission, the kissing/hairspray incident qualifies as sexual harassment, which is categorised as a subset of bullying.

  Children are, essentially, conformists. A sense of belonging is the appeal of the best friend or clique; they affirm and enhance the self. Belonging to an ‘us-world’ grants inhabitants a sense of being larger than life. The faith in the other members of the ‘us’ and their faith in you, the movement of this faith flowing back and forth in an open channel, somehow feeds the self, makes it bigger than it was, gives one a confidence and boldness unachievable alone. For the most part, the ‘us-world’ Emma and I created was harmless fun – watching Jamie Redfern on Young Talent Time, arranging dance routines, looking for oysters around the rocks of the sailing club that Emma’s family frequented. But there was a toxic side to our firm friendship, rooted in social traumata and conditioning, carelessness, and cruelty. Bullying, racism, rejection and all their negative consequences are the shadow life of the need to belong, to carve out an ‘us’ against the ‘them’. The very nature of belonging to one friendship, group, school, area or subculture necessitates rejection: some will not be admitted. Belonging is, then, defined in relation to non-belonging others. This is natural and not, the experts assure us, cause for alarm. When does this normal social order become bullying, and how does it relate to trauma?

  One day, a boy called Angelo, who lived at the end of our street, threw a birthday party, to which Emma and I were not invited. We scooped a dried-out dog turd off the footpath and wrapped it up in endless sheets of newspaper, finally covering it with gift-wrap. We presented the gift to Angelo at his front door, party balloons bobbing in the rooms behind him, with our smiling wishes for a happy birthday. We also turned on a girl who lived a few doors down, for no good reason. My mother had some innocuous pills that had the peculiar side effect of turning her urine blue. Emma and I stole a few of these and produced some blue piss of our own, then poured it into an empty perfume bottle and gave it to the girl as a present. I have no idea what these children made of our cruelty, but the memories stand as evidence of the unspeakable spite children are capable of in their us-against-them narratives.
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  I’m ashamed to admit now that if racism wasn’t the root of these dastardly deeds it was certainly the fertiliser. At that time, the children of Italian and Greek immigrants were marginalised at school, with their strange-smelling foods and their pierced ears and olive skin. I wasn’t raised by my family to be a racist, at least not your average white-supremacist kind of racist. But, as with gender, the learnings seep in from all around from the moment we can make even partial sense of a sound or an image. Even so, there’s no denying those wilfully unkind acts expressed a pointed anxiety around difference, and an arrogant assumption of superiority. I have no recollection of our thought processes or if we manufactured justifications, and though researchers, educators and psychologists continue debating exactly why bullying occurs, they do seem to agree on the common theme of power and control. To my mind, shame is key, specifically the kind of shame John Bradshaw calls ‘toxic shame’, which I refer to as ‘traumatic shame’. Direct correlations have also been made between bullying and abuse in the home.

  A 2007 survey of seven hundred fifth-grade students indicated that both bullies (youth who bully others but do not tend to be bullied themselves) and bully-victims (youth who both bully and are bullied) report high levels of victimisation in their homes and/or communities (59 per cent for bully-victims, 61 per cent for bullies). Bully-victims also report high levels of child maltreatment (44 per cent) and sexual victimisation (32 per cent). Though researcher Melissa K. Holt and her colleagues stress that victimisation in other domains was not a factor in every case of bullying, the findings underscore the importance of keeping ‘the broader victimization context in mind so that the youth who do experience multiple victimization forms can obtain the services that they need’. Other studies discuss a ‘blame the victim’ and ‘pity the perpetrator’ mentality among some teachers. Still, everyone agrees that bullying presents a major challenge that involves an incapacity, or unwillingness, to extend respect in the face of difference.

  When I mentioned to an Italian-Australian friend over lunch that I was writing about bullying, she told me she had been targeted as a ‘wog’ because she dared to be attractive, talented and a top student. She explained, ‘I wasn’t allowed to stand out. As soon as I did, a hate campaign started against me. It began with taunts about my loving myself and thinking I was beautiful.’ But many victims of bullying are at the very lowest rung of school’s social order: the only student from a particular cultural background, the stutterer, the loner odd child – persecuted not as tall poppies but as worthless weeds. Some children are not just bullied for their difference, but tortured for it.

  When we caught up for coffee, Tom C. volunteered the haunting story of an event that took place not long after I’d left North Annandale. A lone Aboriginal girl stands in the playground. A child starts chanting, ‘Scaboriginy, scaboriginy …’ Other nearby children join in. Before long she is surrounded by what seems like the entire school chanting and clapping. It’s an image befitting a horror movie. I struggle to imagine how this child psychologically survived this ordeal. I can’t help wondering where she is now, what her life is like and how she shares her days with this scarring memory.

  I wasn’t raised to be a racist, at least not your average white-supremacist kind of racist (reprised). My grandfather had emigrated with his family from Myanmar as a young man. Emma was of Pacific Islander and Chinese, as well as Anglo, heritage. Before marrying my mother, my father had fallen in love with and almost married an Indian woman named Meera. My parents were once evicted for having Indian dinner guests in the 1950s. My mother was friends with renowned First Nations actor, filmmaker, activist and teacher Brian Syron and the playwright Bobby Merritt, who had been brought up on Erambie Aboriginal Mission (she later had an affair with Bobby, and years after that, when I was in my late teens, I also had a brief fling with him). When I lived in multicultural Glebe as a child, I had Fijian and Chinese friends and an Italian boyfriend. But for all that I can’t claim we were above racism. You’re infected before you hit kindy (as young as three, according to professor Mahzarin Banaji, psychologist and prejudice expert at Harvard University). You harbour it like a latent virus for which the only antidote is an educated dose of judicious honesty and corrective humility. I like to think I wouldn’t have participated in this schoolyard stuff of nightmares though I can’t be sure and – note to self – just not actively participating is not enough in any case.

  I think of that girl standing alone in the playground surrounded by jeers and white faces and wonder if I would have had the courage to cry out against them, to stand with her against the hateful humiliation, but if I’m honest with myself I know I wouldn’t have. I was a child who took knick-knacks and gifts from my grandparents to school as currency with which to purchase popularity. I was too desperate to be liked, to fit in. Shame circulates, menacing like a ghoul looking for its next feast of flesh. It stopped at that girl because she was Aboriginal in settler-colonial Australia, and her abusers had inherited not only the land their descendants stole from her, but also their attitudes and entrenched sense of superiority.

  This collective schoolyard bullying was, of course, symptomatic of the weighty systematic abuses and relentless traumas inflicted on First Nations peoples since Arthur Phillip sailed the First Fleet into ‘Port Jackson’ in January 1788 on his mission to establish a British penal colony. Over the past two hundred and thirty years, Indigenous Australians have suffered a severity of generational trauma matched by few other peoples on the planet. Professor Judy Atkinson (no relation), a Jiman and Bundjalung woman, and an expert on trauma, violence and healing in Indigenous communities, responded on social media to the news about Don Dale and the torture of youth in correctional facilities. In her post, she expressed dismay at the failure of patriarchal and institutional efforts to contain or correct the effects of transgenerational trauma:

  The ‘system’ itself is broken and in crisis. Are we willing to look at the Child Protection system that can’t cope, a system that is unable to keep children safe, even when they are in their care? Are we willing to question the education system, the one place where all children are supposed to be each school day, at school, yet which suspends kids for a hundred days in two hundred over a year, or expels them? To what? To where? The first suspension is the first step to Juvenile Justice and prison. Are we willing to question what happens in our educational system when we have known abusers working with kids, and nothing is done? Are we willing to name the fact that in the health workforce, very few workers have trauma informed knowledge let alone trauma specific skills: in the health system, in the child protection system, in the correctional system? Are we willing to acknowledge that some kids are on Ice at seven years of age, and we don’t have rehabs that take in kids of that age for detox? Are we willing to look at the unskilled workforce, at every level? And that under[funded] or unfunded workers, who do have skills, have their programs discontinued? Are we willing to look at the fact that when a child or children are removed by the state and placed in a non-Aboriginal family, that family may receive $120,000 or more, as paid foster parents, but if the same child is placed with their grandmother, the grannie receives no financial support?

  Well, are we?

  But Atkinson is not talking to white people. She knows we’re not listening, or not listening nearly hard enough. She knows we’re busy fretting about tax cuts, interest rates, crows’ feet. She’s addressing First Nations people, going on to say: ‘what are we going to do? Protest! Yes, that is important. But what about working to put up clear alternatives to this system that is broken. I hear the talk about self-determination, but that means taking responsibility for ensuring our kids are safe. At this time in my life, self-determination means working together to put up programs so we can work with the kids like Dylan Voller, and the many others like him I know. I don’t think the state, the system, is going to do it. It is broken.’

  I’m sad for the girl surrounded in the playgroun
d, now an adult living with that memory if indeed she still lives. Sad for the Dylan Vollers and the kids on ice and for the families and communities so torn by trauma and its web of a/effects that they struggle to keep their children safe, but I’m angry too. The neoliberal neo-colonial capitalist patriarchal system is broken, propped up by government propping up big business with bailouts and offshore tax havens for the rich, chugging on thanks to the hard work of people, either complicit, powerless or oblivious, and defended most heartily by those compromised by conflicts of interest. The ignorance of a nation perpetuates this brokenness, and seems determinedly unequal to the challenges it presents. Those wielding the power and funds don’t know how to listen; don’t know how to ask the right questions. They lack a comprehensive understanding of the long-term effects of severe and chronic trauma that might inform more effective measures, responses and assistance. Perhaps because there is too much at stake. Land. Resources. Investments in the status quo. And leadership suffers from the same tendency to deny and minimise that afflicts the general populace. Governments disregard or underplay the role of trauma for many reasons (ignorance, yes, but also cynicism, pathological neoliberalism, and ethically bankrupt agenda-setting), and it doesn’t help that the notion that trauma can be transmitted across generations is relatively new, contested and difficult to verify.

  At the frontier of trauma studies, researchers are seeking to confirm whether trauma can be passed down not only through abuse, neglect, stories and a myriad of trauma-related behaviours but also directly in the form of ‘molecular memory’. The suggestion here is that epigenetic changes – or the modification of gene expression – in one generation can be inherited by a subsequent generation. The epigenome, as Kylie Andrews explains for the ABC, is ‘a set of instructions that decides which bits of your DNA are activated, or which genes are switched on or off’. It shares our cells with our genome (the double-helix DNA code unique to each and every individual), but it is tailored in different cells to suit specific locations and functions in the body: while your genome can’t be altered, your epigenome can.