Women in Hiding Press
  • Home
  • DigitalWIH
  • DigitalBTS
  • DigitalFAH

The Permitted Abuse of Elderly Women

5/29/2013

 
Elder Abuse Awareness Day, June 15  

By Kathleen Hoy Foley
Elder abuse is what happens in shabby nursing homes at the hands of evil caregivers, or at the other end of a phone line when a lowlife bleeds an oldster’s bank account dry.  Once exposed, elder abuse gives rise to public fury and incites cries for political action and criminal prosecution.  There is something ugly to see when an elder’s arm is black and blue or when retirement savings have been siphoned away by a no-name loser and his computer. 
 
But what about elder abuse that is invisible to the eye?  What about elder abuse that is permitted?  Not only permitted, but encouraged and celebrated?  It is particularly sinister when abuse disguises itself as a noble cause and delivers its wounds from the shadows, especially to those unequipped to protect themselves.  Abuse, no matter what name it goes by or how it is concealed, always injures a body and damages a life.

An elderly person subjected to abuse forgoes all hope for emotional recovery.  The impact is too great; the time to rebuild what has been destroyed too limited.  Abuse perpetuated against an elderly woman defines the rest of her life.  It is her final chapter.  For many of us, it was also our first chapter.

I am an old woman among thousands of old women across this country who, as juveniles, were brutally impregnated in a time when we did not own our own bodies, when sexual assault lacked description, and termination rights did not exist.  Rape was our offense.  And pregnancy was our punishment.  We hid out in maternity homes.  But the finger of public accusation found us anyway and pointed straight at our disgraced, swollen bellies.  Eventually we were rescued by the confidential adoption process that freed us from all connections to the assailant and returned us to our lives.  But we were permanently, catastrophically injured, and forever shamed.  We are shame—embodied and visceral.  Trauma is our permanent, screeching companion.
   
Once again we stand accused.  We are elderly women hunted because of those secret, shameful pregnancies.  We are ghosts fabricated from delusions.  We are worn bodies hunted by younger aggressors manic with obsession, spewing anger the equivalent of road rage.  We are relics hunted for our names; our lineage; for the blood circulating in our veins.  We are fossils hunted for the bones and flesh that structure our images.  We are sideshow freaks hunted for our deformities and DNA.  We are little girls in wrinkled skin hunted to provide humiliating, ancient sexual details.  We were forced breeders, broodmares hunted now as mothers.

We are invisible.  Young aggressors mock our trauma as fictional.  Yet we are in your family, among your friends.  We eat at your Thanksgiving table.  We are mute, unseen old women singed by the legacy of sexual violence.  Violence that never found justice or voice.  We could not seek justice because justice was not available to us.  We had no name for rape or sexual abuse.  No words for the unspeakable.  No reference for sexual violence committed by familiar faces.  Sexual assault was part of our lives.  It occurred in our homes.  In our schools.  In our churches.  At family gatherings.  We were invisible girls assaulted in plain sight.  It was what we endured and what we were blamed for.  It was a time when girls lived at the mercy of male aggressors—sexual predators who frolicked on wide-open playgrounds.  We were their free amusement.

Now we are elderly women terrified of exposure.  We have protected our loved ones from our sordid pasts even as we live trembling in dark, secret hiding from its pursuit.  We know that our families cannot protect us.  Caregivers won’t protect us.  Nursing homes, like the archaic maternity homes where once we cowered, can’t protect us.  No cop with a gun strapped to his hip can protect us from abuse that is permitted. 

As the clamor to unseal confidential adoption records grows steadily louder and increasingly hostile and the public imagines fairytale “reunions,” elderly women are silently absorbing the blows and sucker punches landed by aggressors advancing toward them in revenge.  Lawmakers are swayed by ignoble rhetoric from aggressors disguising themselves as champions for adoption reform and retroactive justice.  The public is influenced by delusions of sentimental, made-for-television, “mommy” moments, as the mental health community remains stonewall silent on the living damage of past sexual trauma in the elderly.  All the while, traumatized old women remain targets of strangers hunting them—aggressors enjoying public and legal support as they claim entitlement to elderly women’s lives, their beloved families, and their cherished homes during their final, fleeting chapters.

June 15 is Elder Abuse Awareness Day.  Abusing an elderly woman by invading her life, destroying her privacy, and exposing her past sexual wounds is indefensible.  Perverting that abuse into a righteous cause and celebrating it as a victory is not only contemptible, it is a call for political action and criminal prosecution.

We are the mute old women sitting at your dinner table.  We are elderly women terrified of the aggressors chasing us because of a catastrophic, confidential pregnancy. 

We need your help. 
 

Elder Abuse Awareness Day, June 15

Not All Trauma Victims Are Treated Equally

1/29/2013

 
By Philip Foley
Have you ever considered who you validate as a “true” trauma victim?  The people who suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  I’d like you to ponder this thought for a bit.  To gain insight into why you may not treat all victims of a catastrophic injury the same way, you may want to examine the culture, religion, and social conditions in which you were raised and live in.

Perhaps part of the problem is that not all catastrophic injury is evident.  I do not suggest in any way that the PTSD suffered from a visible injury is any less traumatic than a covert, hidden injury only that they are both equally traumatic.  My wife was impregnated by rape as a young teen and was forced to live with secret, crippling trauma for most of her adult life.  Not knowing what to look for made it difficult for me to recognize the signs of acute trauma. 

It is fairly easy to empathize with someone who suffers the loss of a limb or is known to be battling cancer. What is more difficult is when the trauma comes from an invisible, covert or "unacceptable" source.  The vast majority of child abuse and sexual assault’s are not witnessed.  Most often there are no visible signs.

Thankfully, today our society publicly supports our military personnel.  We are better at accepting that not all the catastrophic war injuries are obvious to us.  We have a greater understanding of the consequences of sending our youth off to protect our freedom.  Those of us who remember the returning Viet Nam vets know this was not always the case.

We can use this same parallel to address how we treat victims of sexual assault and other unseen traumatic events.  Perhaps you are already aware that over 25 percent of our children are victims of sexual assault before they reach the age of 18.  If over 25 percent of our population had the bird flu, our government would mobilize into high gear to stop the epidemic.  Yet this epidemic of sexual assault is greatly ignored.  The ignored traumas of these victims eventually implode or explode. The personal, social and cultural cost of this unrecognized trauma is substantial. 

As individuals and as a society we can help all victims of trauma.  We can begin by educating ourselves and others about the signs of trauma and by extending compassion to the victims.  We can support trauma victims by encouraging them to speak about what happened to them, by not turning away because we are uncomfortable.  We can reflect back to them their goodness, their courage.  We must withhold our requirement for them to “forgive” and to “heal,” and allow them to discover their own path.

Through this shared journey of understanding with a victim, we in turn gain a greater understanding of ourselves. When a victim of PTSD is provided the time needed to dispel misconceptions, discover unknown truths, and acquire better understanding of themselves and their ordeal, we will be rewarded with knowing a person experiencing a full life, with a freedom that comes from acknowledgement of the torment that held them prisoner.

My wife and I encourage all victims to acknowledge what was “done to them” and speak.
With compassion and an open mind we can make life a little better for ALL those who suffer from a PTSD. 

Who and Why We Are

1/23/2013

 
We are not activists, Phil and I, at least we never set out to be.  All that changed when a stranger-adoptee refusing to accept "no contact" for an answer, rampaged into our family inflicting such personal damage I did not think I could survive.

The stranger-adoptee had gained access to my confidential personal and medical information from records legally and permanently sealed by State of New Jersey.

Thousands of women in this country now in their 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond experienced catastrophic pregnancies as girls and young women and with no other options available, were forced to give birth.  For many of us, adoption--our confidentiality guaranteed by permanently sealed records--gave us our lives back.  Giving birth does not make you a mother any more than abortion does.    Today these women, many of them elderly, face threats of being hunted down and found by stranger-adoptees and the dread of their secret pasts being exposed to friends and family, including their children, grandchildren and even great grandchildren.  I was  subjected to that naked exposure and it is an anguish unimaginable, practically unexplainable to those who have not suffered such inexcusable public humiliation. 

The New Jersey State Government, (and many other states) at the insistence of adoptees, is opening or seriously considering unsealing confidential adoption records.  Every girl/woman listed in those records will be coerced into the frequent relinquishment of her private medical information for the rest of her life to a stranger-adoptee; perhaps beyond, by way of surviving relatives.  Government actions will insure that whatever event brought about the secret, catastrophic pregnancy--rape, incest or any traumatic situation--will be exposed and forever attached to that woman's legacy, to be relived with each mandated medical update. 

For over a decade Phil has been on a one-man mission to combat this injustice.  He pounds on the doors of legislators.  He shouldered his way into testifying before the N.J. Human Services Committee.  He talks to anyone who will listen about this sanctioned cruelty toward aging women. Together we have appeared on television news, granted interviews to newspapers and written op eds.  I have written a book.

My own personal mission is to speak the ugly in terms that cannot be misunderstood or romanticized.  To validate victims of sexual violence and other forms of abuse by illustrating with raw clarity the harrowing details hidden beneath society's sanitized labels of rape, incest, abuse, stalking, birth mother--all the nearly polite, acceptable descriptions that ignore and deny horrors experienced by victims of such ordeals.      

The women hiding these horrors include our mothers and grandmothers.  Our great-grandmothers.  Women too ashamed, too gracious to reveal sexual traumas buried in their pasts.  Women who serve Thanksgiving dinners and wrap birthday presents.  Women we never want to imagine being forced into sexual acts.  Women who bear that agony in silence for a lifetime.  Because sexual abuse is a life-long sentence that no amount of love or therapy can erase.

It was not until I faced what hid in the dark and expressed it as powerfully as I experienced it, did I begin to reclaim some of what was stolen from me.  By speaking the ugly, the past began to release its power over me.  However uncomfortable I am depicting the realities of abuse, I believe that each time I choose to speak, I validate not only my own ordeal but that of every woman in hiding.        So, yes, if speaking out is considered activism, then I suppose Phil and I are activists.  

If you are a woman fearful of being exposed through the unsealing of confidential adoption records and have a story to tell the N.J. legislators and the Human Services Committee, please feel free to contact us (anonymously is fine) and we will make sure your voice is heard.  Or perhaps you are from another state and simply want to express your outrage.

If you are a woman of age and have been concealing the secret of sexual abuse in your past, please know that we invite you to speak your own ugly here.  You may contact us by regular mail or email. 

Sincerely, Kathleen & Phil Foley

How Would You Know If Someone You Love Suffers From PTSD?

1/22/2013

 
Post by Philip Foley 
As a police officer in a major New Jersey city for 25 years, I met many victims of obvious trauma.  Many more were not so obvious.  Their trauma was a consequence of covert and sustained violence revealed only in their eyes.  They were the mute, unseen victims of violence.
I met my wife when she was 17, in the early 60’s.  On the surface her family looked like any other regular middle class suburban family.  I didn’t know that she was suffering with severe PTSD, nor did she.  She buried what had happened to her “before us” and had no tools to even identify herself as a victim.  I couldn’t help—I didn’t know the “code.”
For thirty years her symptoms were there, only I attributed them to quirks: irrational fears I could not understand and she could not explain; panic attacks; unexplained emotional reactions after social gatherings; trouble sleeping.
Then the day came when my wife’s “before us” exploded into our lives.
Now 16 years later, both of us in our 60’s, we have a much greater understanding of how PTSD victims perceive the world around them.  Of how difficult it is for them to assign responsibility to those who failed to protect them.  And how by offering perspective, not advice you will greatly help a PTSD sufferer live a more fully realized life.
PTSD affects everyone connected to the victim.  There is no easy fix.  But with love, true support and time, victims can integrate the “them before trauma” and the “them after trauma” and become whole and truly enjoy a full and happy life.
My wife’s book, “Woman In Hiding, A True Tale of Back Door Abuse, Dark Secrets and Other Evil Deeds” describes her journey from brokenness to understanding and into wholeness.  It is our sincere hope that her words can transmute her ordeal into education for professionals and validation and understanding for women suffering—unseen and unheard—from trauma they cannot and dare not name.
Additionally; we offer a Social Arts Project “Silenced Women Speak” for victims to express their experience in art or verse.
For more information on my wife’s book and the Social Arts Project please visit www.wihpress.com.org  or contact us at
info@womeninhidingpress.org

    Categories

    All
    ADOPTION PRIVACY
    EXCERPT: Woman In Hiding
    INTROSPECTIVE
    POEMS
    SHAMING WOMEN
    TRAUMA
    VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

    Archives

    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    February 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    July 2016
    March 2016
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013

    RSS Feed


    Women in Hiding Press Books:
    Picture
    Picture

    About the Author

    In the provocative spirit of Matilda Joslyn Gage, Gloria Anzaldua, and Mary Daly, Kathleen Hoy Foley expands and deepens the voice of female experience.

    Raw. Uncompromising. Compassionate. Deliberately antagonistic. Kathleen writes to awaken the courage within the reader.


    TO THE SURVIVOR
    If you are a person who was victimized as a child or as an adult, I am so very sorry you ever had to suffer at the hands of a predator. 

    I am sorry you were abused, sorry no one protected you, sorry you have felt so alone, sorry you have been so afraid then and in the now. I am so sorry for the loss of your innocence. 

    You were and are entitled to you life. And you had a right to inherit your own body. And no matter what you did or what you think you failed to do you are not to blame. Sexual abuse is never a victim's choice. Sexual abuse is something that was done to your body not something you wanted. 

    This is an excerpt from: 

    http://web.archive.org/web/20130101063123/http://true-perspective.org 

    Kathleen and I encourage you to visit this site for perspective on your ordeal. Live happy and whole. Claim you power! 

    You are your own authority.

    Question Everything.  Including social, religious & political authorities

    Learn to listen and respond to your intuition.  It is never wrong.

    Learn to be impolite.  It must be part of your defense system.

    Nothing is unspeakable.

    Stare truth in the eye and speak it.

    You name abuse.  Listen to your body.  It will tell you.  It is never wrong. 

    Stare abuse in the eye and speak it.

    Stare abusers in the eye and name them.

    Use your voice.  Use your words. 

    BE LOUD.  Violence against girls, boys, women and men hides in the silent shadows.

    Know that you are powerful.

    KNOW THAT YOUR VOICE IS POWERFUL.   USE IT.



© Copyright 2014-2020 Women in Hiding Press
Proudly powered by Weebly