“To study psychological trauma is to come face to face both with human
vulnerability in the natural world and with the capacity for evil in human nature. To study psychological trauma means bearing witness to horrible events. When the events are natural disasters or “acts of God,” those who bear witness sympathize readily with the victim. But when the traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator. It is morally impossible to remain
neutral in this conflict. The bystander is forced to take sides.

It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering. Leo Eitinger, a psychiatrist who has studied survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, describes the cruel conflict of interest
between victim and bystander: “War and victims are something the community wants to forget; a veil of oblivion is drawn over everything painful and unpleasant. We find the two sides face to face; on one side the victims who perhaps wish to forget but cannot, and on the other all those with strong, often unconscious motives who very intensely both wish to forget and succeed in doing so. The contrast . . . is frequently very painful for both sides. The weakest one . . . remains the losing party in this silent and unequal dialogue.”

In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated
and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case, it is time to forget the past and move on.

The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.
The perpetrator’s arguments prove irresistible when the bystander faces them in isolation. Without a supportive social environment, the bystander usually succumbs to the temptation to look the other way. This is true even when the victim is an idealized and valued member of society. Soldiers in every war, even those who have been regarded as heroes, complain bitterly that no one wants to know the real truth about war.

When the victim is already devalued (a woman, a child), she may find that the most traumatic events of her life take place outside the realm of socially validated reality. Her experience becomes unspeakable.”

Trauma and Recovery
Judith Herman, M. D.

I cringe to think this passage would apply to me if I were not educated from an early age and quite familiar with man-made atrocities, yet it helps me to see, if but a glimpse, what the vast sea of people feel who cannot bring themselves to believe my life was as I say. They get to choose. They get to take the softer easier road of non-belief. They get to ease their minds and let it go and forget and move on because of course my story never happened. Of course, the accused is innocent, of course, he/she would never…

And yet it happened and the only one to pay is the victim who has already paid and paid and paid. We are the ones to come to drink and drug, or have too much sex, or freeze our hearts and bodies. We are the ones who feel the shame and the guilt and cannot trust or let down our guard. We are the ones who come to believe in the deepest part of us, that we are bad, soiled, evil.

It is all backwards and upside down. And it is vile.

It never occurred to me when I first began to tell my life story that I would not be believed. I was there, it was my body, my mind, my heart, and yet the cards were stacked in favor of my brothers from the beginning, before the beginning just by the fact that people will rather believe these atrocities do not happen.

But atrocities do happen. And someone has to pay. So far, it is nearly always the victim, even more so if he/she dares to speak out. The perpetrators live their lives secure in the fact that victims are rarely believed. They get away with it and never care a whit about those they have broken.

When my sister, Valerie died several of my brothers were over heard at her memorial discussing how bad it would be if people were to find out what they had done. Where was their care for the tortured sister? But they were worried about me and my speaking out so boldly.

I see now there is little I can do. It makes me angry. It makes me sad. It makes my heart hurt for the many millions of abused children who do now, and always will grow up broken inside, while the perpetrators smile sweetly and say “Who, me?”