Why Does The Victim Often Have More Trouble than the Offender?

So here I am, in trouble again, and maybe you have been stuck in this same kind of trouble. The person who does the harm often wriggles free by turning it around on the one they hurt. They had it coming. They were dumb enough to deserve losing. Why would they trust somebody that easily anyway? And if the offender does get caught, the price they pay rarely matches, in money, inconvenience, or embarrassment, what the whole thing cost the person on the receiving end. Victims, meanwhile, get handed a different job: being the damaged one, the person whose repair takes forever, never quite finishes, and leaves marks.

I am a survivor of sexual abuse. The word victim itself does something to me. I never asked for any of it, but it came anyway, and if I say so out loud, the way I am doing right now, it will land on me again. I did not even understand what had happened until the first time I felt a sexual response while making out, and then watched it vanish. I tried fixing it a dozen ways. Nothing took, so I just carry it. There is also this sense that the label sticks: once a victim, always one.

A therapist I saw once told me I was sexually attractive, and it made my skin crawl in the moment. When I was leaving town and our sessions ended, he said I should drop by and tell him how I was doing if I ever came back. I came back. What he had in mind was sex. Everything after that point is a blank to me. I was so naive, and I was made into a victim all over again. That is when it clicked why I had never believed I was attractive: being attractive was dangerous. It wore down my sense of worth, too. Does being seen as desirable mark a person as fair game for exploitation? In my case it certainly seemed to.

Grade school filed me under behavior problem. Was that me reacting to the abuse? Almost all my teachers back then were men. My single best year was the one year I had a woman teacher. Nobody at the time stopped to ask whether the behavior had a cause; they just did not know what to do with me. At graduation they would not name me valedictorian, citing my conduct, so I told them I would skip the ceremony entirely if they held to that. We met in the middle. I accepted the award for highest grades in the class instead. I may have been one of the first kids to threaten a graduation boycott. Someone also told me I would never earn above a B in high school. I finished as Salutatorian. At one point the school had me take the WISC, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, which makes me think they suspected I was smarter than my record suggested. I was never told my score.

The bus was its own ordeal. I got bullied on it and not one adult lifted a finger, and I had done nothing to earn it. I passed the ride reading aloud to the younger kids. Eventually I just quit taking the bus, even though home was out in the country. In the auditorium at lunch I belonged to what I called the out group. We sat together, all for different reasons: the country kids, the kids written off as slow, the kids without money. My reason was simpler. The snobby cliques would not have me, so I landed with everybody else they turned up their noses at.

The way I see it, I became a source of other people's amusement, paid for out of my own hide. Crime victims generally are not made whole for what gets taken from them. People whose houses are broken into often never relax inside their own walls again.

So what is the full tab? Peace of mind. Money, and especially the legal fees stacked on top. Medical bills. The therapy a person needs afterward. Add the things that cannot be invoiced: no more normal emotional reactions, a shrunken ability to trust anyone, memories that haunt or memories that simply disappear, the dread of ever being in that kind of situation again. How much of this does the offender ever actually cover? Does prison, if it comes to that, really settle the account? A lot of the time nothing gets made right at all, because nobody can name or find the person who did it, or because what they did is not even counted as a crime.

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