Invisible Girls

WELCOMING PANDORA

My Take on the Ancient Greek Myth

According to Greek myth, Pandora was the first woman, like Eve of Hebrew myth. She is said to have received many, many gifts from the gods—hence her name, which means “all gifted” or “all gifts.” Aphrodite gave her beauty; Apollo gave her musical talent and a gift for healing; Hermes gave her a box and told her not to open it. Then he gave her curiosity!

Here she was, holding this beautiful box she had been ordered not to open. A smart and energetic young woman, in defiance of the patriarchy, she opened the box. Out spilled all the great misfortunes of the world, including the pain of all girls and women who had ever been sexually abused.

Others might have feared letting such troubles out of the box, but Pandora knew that when you keep a box closed you also close off hope. She knew that hope lies in opening the box, in revealing the truth, in releasing the trauma. She was not afraid. She knew that girls are healed every time girl’s and women’s sexual trauma is let out of its box and released into the world. I invite all of you to join me in opening Pandora’s box.

PREFACE

It’s Never the Survivor’s Fault

I receive e-mails like this every day from teen girls all over the world, girls who found my book and are awakening to the fact that the sexual abuse they have experienced is not their fault—and that they can heal.

Before we published the first edition of Invisible Girls in 2005, girls who had survived sexual abuse found me and my psychotherapy work through an underground network, with one girl telling another and then another. What this book has done is expand that network, enabling me to provide a lifeline to girls in every corner of every state and continent. The book has made its way around the world, touching and empowering girls and women from Australia to Indiana, from Kansas City and Seattle and Louisville, to China, Mexico, Italy, and France—even Saudi Arabia. I know because I hear from them every day.

Every day, girls who have found our book reach out to me. They are building networks and making extraordinary connections. Girls and women—and their mothers, sisters, boyfriends, girlfriends—find Invisible Girls at their college or neighborhood bookstore or online; they are given copies to read at residential treatment centers and by therapists, teachers, friends, lovers, parents. They’ve found the book at the school library, from my website, a cousin, pediatrician, rape crisis center, aunt. Our intent was to reach girls in our urban centers, where books are easier to come by, and way beyond, where they are not, and we did it. Every day invisible girls, girls who were scared and alone and thought they were to blame or going crazy are becoming visible. They are finding the help and hope they so deserve, and they are healing—and thriving.

Sometimes their first contact is simply reaching out. A girl wants to know whether what she experienced is really abuse, or she wants to tell someone how guilty she feels for what happened to her. She thinks it must somehow have been her fault. Most of my e-mails are from girls and women who have never told anyone about their abuse. Some of these girls are as young as twelve years old. And some of the women are in their sixties. The e-mail to me is the first telling. She somehow got her hands on the book, and now she wants to tell me what happened. She feels she can trust me. And because I make myself available to my readers, I become a kind of springboard for these girls and their healing. They make that first contact, and their whole world begins to shift and change. Some of the girls who have written to me have kept in contact for years now.

One eighteen-year-old from Minnesota e-mailed me: “ ‘It is never a survivor’s fault.’ I have carried these words with me for the past six months until they finally sank in. This saying along with one that I tell myself every morning when I wake up and when someone ridicules me, ‘Being the abused one isn’t the crime, but not telling is’—I believe this to be very true. I have soaked up every word that is in this book, and I have become a strong survivor!”

Girls and women from all over the world write to say thank you, to say they’d never had the courage to speak about their abuse out loud until they read the book. They write to say I’m “healing.” I can’t imagine work more rewarding than this. These readers are creating a strong community of healing and strength, and resolution.

Every day invisible girls are finding their way to the book and to their own healing and wholeness. In this edition, we want you to hear their voices. In Chapter 17, “Five Years of E-mails and Letters from Around the World: Girls Become More and More Visible Every Day,” you will hear directly from girls and women who contacted me after reading the book. They want you to hear their responses and their stories of healing and how they were changed by reading Invisible Girls.

It also became clear to me through my recent work that we needed to add the voices of girls “in the life.” Sex trafficking, prostitution, and pornography are forms of sexual abuse, and the voices of these girls and young women are so strong and clear. Chapter 12, “Stop Calling Us Whores: Prostitution Is Sexual Abuse,” addresses the issues involved in these forms of abuse, especially in light of the ways violence against girls and women has become so much more tolerated and normalized through popular culture. I have the honor of working with girls from GEMS (Girls Educational and Mentoring Services), an organization committed to helping young women ages twelve through twenty-one get out of the commercial sex industry, and in the chapter, you will hear their amazing voices. Girls who have been prostituted feel the same as the invisible girls who have been molested by their fathers, uncles, or brothers. They shared their experiences on a retreat I sponsored through Girlthrive, my nonprofit where girls from upper-middle-class suburbs bonded with girls from marginal urban areas who were prostituted.

Through our index, you can more easily return to particular issues and stories, as well as a few organizations for boys and men to step up and join the fight to end violence against girls and women. When I ask myself what has changed in the world, in the law, in public policy and awareness since the first and second editions were published, the answer is, not enough. But we are fighting the fight and healing is happening with girls and women. The teen girls and young women who reach out to me through Invisible Girls and my organization Girlthrive, and all our readers, are living proof that this strength and healing is happening in spite of the misogynistic culture against girls and women.

When we first published Invisible Girls, my hope was not only to get girls on their paths to healing but also to participate in some meaningful way in the global movement to stop the abuse of young girls and women. I intended to do my part in changing the culture around sexual abuse and violence against women, by sharing the voices of my brilliant clients and giving guidance throughout. And we have certainly succeeded by giving girls back their hearts and souls. With every girl who finds her voice and stops her abuse or the risk of ever being abused again, we helped her to open up and to love and to trust, and most of all to know she is worthy. My mission was, and is, to reach sexually abused girls directly with the simple message that the abuse they suffered was not their fault and that the very best thing they can do for their healing is to begin to open up about it. And to keep opening up and talking.

Girls are getting the message. They are speaking out, finding their way out of abusive homes, and reclaiming their bodies and moving into healthy, adult relationships. This special book has done what I dreamed it could, and it has been an unbelievably rewarding journey so far.

With this new edition and this new time where conversations about sexual assault and abuse seem possible, we hope to spread our wings even further. As one teen girl from London told me in a recent e-mail:

WELCOME, READERS

Thank you for picking up this book. One out of four girls in the United States will be abused by the time she is sixteen. This book is for all of you. Please know that whoever you are, you are not alone!

If you are a survivor, I want to offer you a special welcome. Whether you are already hard at work healing from the trauma of abuse or are just admitting for the first time—perhaps even to yourself—that you were abused, I hope you will find this book an important step in your healing process.

This book is filled with survivors’ stories, and they may trigger some intense feelings and painful memories for you. Please know that the message woven throughout is that there is deep healing after sexual abuse. Please feel free to skip around and take the book in the doses you can handle. But I will let you know that I was very careful to go slowly and break it down into sections, similar to the ways that girls disclose their sexual abuse. I want you to always feel safe and supported as you are reading. You might want to keep a journal to record your thoughts, feelings, and memories. If you’re not currently in counseling, I hope you will find someone you can trust to share the feelings that come up for you as you read.

If you don’t have someone you can talk with, or cannot find your own community, please know that you can always call RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and Incest Network), the national hotline for rape and incest survivors, at (800) 656-HOPE (800-656-4673), or you can write to me personally at our website, www

.invisiblegirlsthrive.com, which can serve as a companion to the book and an Internet community of girls and young women.

Invisible Girls opens up sexual abuse to the community and to the culture at large. It offers a porthole into the worlds of teenage girls and young women who are abuse survivors. You have never heard the voices of young survivors in quite this way before, where secret worlds and inner coping mechanisms are revealed. To clinicians and medical professionals, parents, high school and university guidance departments, students of psychology, personnel at rape crisis centers and at adolescent and young adult psychiatric units, high school and college psychology classes, partners of survivors, and relatives of abusers: Invisible Girls will lead you to new answers and a deeper understanding of sexual abuse, and it will help you to transform the culture of shame and secrecy that surrounds abuse.

In my thirty years of working with sexual-abuse survivors, I have never stopped being amazed by the ingenuity and brilliance of girls, by their ability to thrive even through horrible experiences. I learn so much from them. I learn how they’ve coped, how they’ve found comfort in the world, how they’ve moved on in their lives and found good, healthy love. These girls are my teachers, and now some of them have come forward to share their journeys with all of you.

The stories, quotes, questions, and poetry included in this book were contributed by some of the hundreds of girls I have worked with over the years. These are girls I know personally. I have worked with some of them for years and followed their success in life. I want you to know them, too, and to grow and learn from their strength, resilience, and experiences. They are all grateful for the opportunity to reach out to you. To ensure their privacy and safety, however, I asked them to choose pseudonyms. With perfect synchronicity, some girls asked whether they could be called by gem names, others flowers, and I realized how perfect that was—that they would be seen in all their brilliance and beauty and radiance: Zinnia, Lily, Coral, Garnet, Topaz, Sage, Ivy, Amber, Jasmine, Iris, Dahlia, Pearl, and Ruby Rose.

In my eyes, each and every one of these girls—and every other sexually abused girl who finds her voice, finds someone to whom she can tell her story—is a heroine. Whether or not you are a survivor, we invite you to join these extraordinary girls in their movement to end the silence, to release the shame and guilt and fear, and to begin the healing of the collective spirit of girls everywhere.