Violence In Families

Hey everyone, so today I wanted to talk about a topic that can be very unpleasant for some, but is unfortunately an event that happens much more frequently than we would like to think.

       Violence and family do not go together when you hear them spoken out loud, but nonetheless it is present in the homes of many. This violence can range from child abuse, spousal abuse, emotional, physical, verbal, sexual - they all fit under this category. I would like to discuss the statistics on abuse in families, but then I would like to argue that in the cases of reuniting an abusive family member in to a family, there is hope. 
        For the purposes of narrowing the information, I want to focus on the sexual abuse of women and children. For women, "Quebec, Canada, found that 6.1% of women were physically abused and 6.8% were sexually abused. And a United Nations report concluded that at least 1 out of every 3 women in the world will experience physical or sexual abuse during their lifetimes" (Lauer, p.294). As for children, there are thousands of abuse cases that are substantiated every year, 9.5% of them being sexual abuse cases (p.294). These numbers are staggering for our world. This means that I could be abused, or you have been abused, or could be abused in the future. That's how many people we are talking about here!
     
       I would like to acknowledge before I go further that there are men and boys out there that are abused, almost as much as women, so as I talk about females being abused in the family I want to be clear that I do not ignore the males.

       So what happens when abuse, particularly sexual abuse, happens in a home? Well firstly let's talk about the effects it has upon the victim. Considering that many abuse cases happen when a woman is below the age of 18, these effects are most relateable there, but a number of them are universally applicable. The detrimental affects during developing years include: behaviour problems, higher levels of anger, lower academics/intellect, low self-esteem, substance abuse, unhappiness, health problems, trust issues, etc (p.298). All of these are just terrible effects that no person male or female should have to experience in the hands of someone else.
      The direction I want to take now is what happens to the abuser? Often times, when they are discovered, they are removed from the home and put into a type of rehabilitation program for a designated amount of time. Here, they are helped in trying to reverse their compulsions of sexual abuse, help them understand the consequences and hoped to reunite with their families. It is understandable that the family, particularly the victim will not want them back. Often times, the abuser relapses back into those behaviors. Also, while the abuser is absent, the family reforms and adapts so that their place is not empty and so reunion can be hard as the abuser now must reestablish their role in the family.
      Many of you may be thinking that reunion is wrong and crazy, that you yourself would never want them to come back,  but what if I were to tell you that it is possible for them to not only to come back, but also for the victim to forgive them? Also, that this may significantly decrease the likelihood of relapse? In class, we discussed a book by a marriage and family therapist that presents a therapy process that will do just that. The book is titled "Sex, Love and Violence".
       In this process, there are about 6 or 7 steps:

1. Get the family together in a circle, therapist asks the parents what they know. Establishes parental authority, gets it out on the table, makes the victim feel more able to share, provides protection, removes denial. 
2. Ask the offender. Keep probing them, offender will start to recognize the effects of actions, educates without lecture.
3. Asks family what they think. Agree and add 1 more; that the spirit of the victim has been hurt. Family may not believe in religion but tend to understand what this means.
4. Point out that it also hurt the spirit of the offender. Offender often agrees, starts to experience emotions toward actions.
5. Other family members express feelings.
6. Offender is asked to kneel in front of the victim and apologize. Victim is to stay there and process continues until the apology of the offender becomes sincere. 

It has been reported that after this process the offender very often is sincere in their apology and the victim sees that they are. In one case mentioned in class, other family members also got down and apologized for things related to the offense. 

       Now I'm not saying that this will grant immediate forgiveness or immediate sincerity, but the results show that the success rate of this method is very high. There is hope for the family and the family member who was temporarily cast out. With a lot of work the can be reunited and they can heal after such an event. The offender is often not evil, or malicious, they are often hurt, or struggling with something they didn't understand before. It's not so simple as tossing them out and casting them in jail. There is hope.