Too often we hear about sexual abuse victims who continue the vicious cycle by doing the same damaging act to others. But in this week’s Wellness for the Real World, Dr. Veronica talks to Brian Beckstead and Dr. Nancy Irwin, two thrivers – not survivors – who are out to prevent the underaged from experiencing what they did.
It’s estimated that a shocking one in two girls and one in three boys fall victim to sex abusers and of those a whopping 95% know their perpetrator. Both Beckstead, founder of The Beckstead Group, which offers individual and business coaching, and Irwin, a psychologist who counts court-mandated sexual abusers among her various patients, fell into that category.
When he was seven, Beckstead, who grew up in a Mormon household in Salt Lake City, was violated by his brother-in-law at home. Eight years later an urologist did the same to him as his father sat in the doctor’s waiting room. Beckstead never told anyone about the solo incident with the family member. But the second time it occurred, he confided in an older co-worker, who in turn told their employer, who informed his parents, who did nothing. The police were never called and the doctor was never confronted.
“By this time I was so embarrassed. I felt I had done something wrong,” said Beckstead, now 44. “I don’t know if they were doing this for my sake. We talked about it recently. They were worried of my embarrassment. Basically I heard all of the excuses. ‘If we call the cops, he’d be arrested. You’re a boy. We don’t want you to be embarrassed. You’d have to go to court.’ They said, ‘Let’s just let this go away.’ ”
Going to the Mormon Church wasn’t an option. “At that time they didn’t deal with it,” he said. “Sometimes there’s that (need) to save face though I don’t know why anybody would want to save face when a child is at issue. But I don’t think they had the tools. I don’t believe they knew what to do.”
Dr. Veronica believes the church should have to abide by the same rules as the medical community when it comes to sexual abuse.
“As a physician, if you suspect sexual abuse in a child you must report it,” Dr. Veronica says. “That needs to be the case in teachers and in clergy. If we find out that clergy are not reporting sexual abuse we should be able to prosecute them as accomplices to the crime.”
But as Beckstead says, “I think they try to be good Christians. Sometimes we believe in the law of repentance and we’re a little too lax. If someone says “I’m sorry,” we just accept that, but we don’t deal with the damage on the other side of what they’re repenting from. If someone commits adultery, causes rape, commits burglary, we just confess (and) move on. The church is too easy to forgive. Particularly when it comes to sexual abuse, there is a victim and that victim, if it’s as a child, is now scarred for life. I’m not a bad looking man. I’ve got a lot of confidence. I do a lot of speaking. But if you can see my scars on my inside, I wouldn’t be something to look at.”
Long term effects of child abuse include fear, anxiety, depression, anger, hostility, inappropriate sexual behavior, poor self esteem, tendency toward substance abuse and difficulty with close relationships. Following the incident with the urologist and his family ignoring it, Beckstead lived what he calls a life of “debauchery” for the next 25 years. “I lived a pretty wild life. I liked to fight.”
He bulked up at the gym and became a fitness trainer. “I decided I was not going to let anyone ever to touch me again,” he said. There were a slew of failed relationships, save for one that spawned 10 years. “I was not emotionally capable of dealing with issues, mostly about intimacy. I was angry.”
And depressed to the point where he sat on a couch and contemplated suicide. Instead he called the Utah Pride Center, a gay and lesbian center in Salt Lake City, and was put in contact with a rape recovery center. “I was seeing a counselor within a couple of weeks,” he says. “That woman saved my life.”
Now Beckstead, whose novel The Stallion Warriors comes out in late fall and tells the tale of a gay man who protects the Mormon Church despite the church being against homosexuality, tries to help others. When his male survivor group did a radio show recently, male listeners called in to express their shock that while they had cautioned their underage daughters about sexual abuse it never occurred to them to talk to their sons about the same topic. Beckstead says male military personnel return from Iraq, complaining of being raped. While the subject is discussed with females in the military, the same can’t be said for the men.
“We don’t have enough education,” Beckstead says. “We need to quit being embarrassed about our bodies. We need to quit being embarrassed about sex. We need to educate.”
Yet he doesn’t think sex education belongs in schools. Instead, he opines, children should be taught by their parents or someone they trust. But in the case of Irwin, she was sexually abused by a married clergy in his 40s and who taught an approved sex ed class in a Presbyterian church in Atlanta. The abuse began when she was 14 and lasted for several years. Although she was turned on, she knew what the clergy did was wrong.
“You have this guilt, the secrecy, the shame,” Dr. Irwin says. “At the same time it feels good. To say the least, to any teenager, it’s confusing. You’re completely split and that’s one of the really damaging effects.”
As a result of what happened to her, she switched back and forth between being promiscuous and using men to shutting down sexually. These days she attempts to help the perpetrators by working with court-mandated sexual offenders.
“No one comes into treatment on their own volition and says, ‘I’m sleeping with a five-year old. Help me.’ If so, I’m mandated to report him and they know this. There are people who say, ‘I’m attracted to this. I’m afraid I’m going to act. Help me.’ Then we don’t have to report anything and we work to prevent that. But that’s a small minority because they’re afraid to admit it, even to themselves.”
She says that at this point research is inconclusive as to determining what makes grown men attracted to children as young as two. One thing is for sure: the abuseees often become the abusers later in life.
“We repeat these patterns when there’s no intervention,” Dr. Irwin says. “When it’s not stopped and you get treatment and you get exposed that it’s inappropriate and (explained) that this is how you express your sexuality — until you have that, there’s a great chance it’s going to be repeated.”
Perpetrators “live in a hot hell of shame and guilt and remorse. When there’s not intervention and help for them and they’re maligned and they can’t even talk about this, what are they going to do? They’re going to go to the only thing that gives them peace and that’s a child. It gives them peace and acceptance and love and affection, even though it’s inappropriate. It’s a vicious cycle. When they can get off that bandwagon and they can pour out the remorse and the guilt and start behaving appropriately there is hope they can turn their lives around.”
Her patients are treated on a case-by-case basis but she often asks them to sketch an autobiography of their sexual development, their role in the family and major life experiences. Were they lonely? Abused? Bullied? What was their relationship with their parents? Once they get past the shame and begin to open up, she focuses on getting them to do the right thing by retraining their sexual fantasies.
“In a nutshell we have them masturbate with the inappropriate fantasies and right before they achieve orgasm they will switch to an appropriate one,” she says.
Calling herself an agent of change, she adds “I’ve been accused of being Pollyanna but I couldn’t do my job if I didn’t believe everybody’s capable of change.”
