Surviving Extreme Child Abuse
This is the working prologue for a book I'm drafting. It's taken me years to emotionally prepare to write, and months to commit once I was ready. I'm sharing this in hopes that survivors will find some use of peace in my healing journey. My prologue here marks the beginning of a messy survival story. My name is Tabitha, and I'm the survivor of child human trafficking.
Ten years ago I was a girl, still underage. I looked fully developed, I thought I knew everything. I did not, I was a child. That child, with a chubby face and bottle colored hair, she is what human trafficking can look like. What it does look like. It happens in front of our eyes: in our schools, libraries, stores, homes, and everywhere people gather. As humans I think we like to imagine the ugliest scenario when it comes to sex abuse, especially that of underage children.?The reality is, the abuse is so much more settle than that. It moves through means of psychological warfare. It looks like the largest contributing factor to my complex PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), personally.?
For me it was a much-too-older man buying my dinner, my breakfast the morning after. Driving me between one place, and his place. It looks … normal, at a glance. That’s what is most frightening. It shakes me, and it’s what helped take years to process the severity of this trauma. The worst parts of my teenage years were covered in rose-tinted cellophane.
Gaslit by police who closed my case when I was seventeen, and didn’t provide me any victims resources. Two school systems overseeing my education, who did nothing but fire the man who groomed and raped me, without providing me any victims resources. My own mother was well aware that this man was grooming me, therefore being involved with it. Every adult and institution led me into a dark corner of a dark room. None of the adults who abused me suffered ‘real’ consequences by any measure.?
It happens in our community, in your community. Human trafficking, child abuse. And it’s seldom strangers who are the culprits lurking in the shadows, it’s friends, acquaintances, family.?
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I feel like some people in life are handed a more difficult set of cards, in my case I fall under the category of “some people”. The abuse in my life began at an early age. In 2005 I was in a fatal car accident where one person sadly died on scene. That contributed to some of my early mental health issues, and eventually my complex PTSD (CPTSD) diagnosis. Such things went ignored and undiagnosed for the sake of my immediate physical health. It's much harder to examine my brain when my legs are in casts, right? I fail to think that appropriate today, but clearly my life experiences indicate that's the series of events that played out. The day of the car accident, I began my first of ten days of isolation. Ten days in the hospital without my parents.?I was nine.
My immediate physical injuries lasted easily into my thirteenth year. I had four surgeries in those years, and would go between wheelchair, to walker, to cane. Depending on which phase of recovery I was in. With four surgeries, I switched between equipment frequently. I was bullied relentlessly in my later stages of surgery recovery. I was called a “faker”, and a “liar” by my peers, and even a few adults. I don’t understand how or why people would want to believe I would fake four surgery recoveries. But I was once pushed out of my wheelchair at elementary school, and I remember a man screaming at my parents that I didn’t need a wheelchair when we were at a supermarket.?
Other teasing was less aggressive, but I was mocked by my peers for needing medical aids until I was done using them at thirteen. People would say, “we can hear you before we can see you!” in reference to my use of crutches. Or my friends' relatives would offer me cans of oil for my “squeaky” leg, held together by metal. All tiny razor cuts, death by a thousand slivers.?Even my friends weren't a a safe space as a young disabled person with a broken home life.
I remember one night my mom locked me out of the house until it was dark, when I was ten. I had no shoes, I had a backpack full of toys. I was crying in a parking lot, a woman drove by and asked me what was wrong. I explained to her what was going on, as best as I understood, she drove off after talking with me for a few minutes. My mother soon came and got me, pretending like everything was fine. She was great at pretending like things were fine, or holding onto anger. It depended on the day.
One night she had broken glass bottles all over the yard, and without telling me, had me walk through and over the shards of glass. My feet bled. Violence came in all forms, I remember spending hours at a time with my nose in a corner, I can’t remember for what. I remember when my step dad made me clean out a litter box with my hands, because “I could wash them off”.?He would abuse me in weird ways like this for the durations of his marriage to my mom.
When I would cry he would say, “come over here and I’ll give you something to cry about,” and he’d hit me. He’d kick me after surgeries if I wasn’t walking in a way he found appropriate. He’d mock the way I walked when I still had a heavy limp, and say sexually explicit things to me. I remember when I gained weight, when I was fully in my eating disorder, my mom would accuse me of being pregnant. She made me pee in a cup on several occasions, only to be tested with inexpensive stick tests.?Today I'm twenty-seven and have yet to give natural birth, I don't understand my moms obsession with my previous teenage reproductive system.
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The abuse on my mothers side worsened as I hit puberty and beyond. I had no reason to see my step dad after the divorce more than once or twice, so I was left alone with her. I was isolated from friends, family, and previous relatives on his side of the family. She forced me to get sterilized.?
Not FGM (female genital mutilation), no. She forced me to “consent” to getting?a plastic birth control stick implanted in my arm, that I had until I was eighteen. I got it removed. It happened at the Planned Parenthood in Florence, she said to me, “if you don’t say yes (to the procedure) I'll kick your ass”, and I believed her. I still have scars on my arm, I hate looking at it, feeling it. It’s a permanent reminder, one of the few physical scars from the abuse. It’s ironically funny, a lot of people think violence means the throwing of fists, shedding of blood. The most violence I faced was coercion under threat, the power of control. It’s the invisible shackles that controlled me.?And the screws over my window panes in my bedroom, too.
The only time I interacted with my step dad after the divorce, I was fifteen. It was the summer between my Freshman and Sophomore year of high school, it was 2011. One year before I started community college as a high school Junior. My mom was enraged that I’d been sleeping with my high school boyfriend. I hadn't told her, and didn't intend on telling her. She wasn't a safe person to talk with about my sexual health.
He was the first person I'd been sexually active with, and we were in a long term relationship. I'd gotten on one form of birth control, and had a backup method. That didn’t matter to my mom.?What mattered to her, is that I didn't listen. She wouldn't see me as a human with a body, she wouldn't see me as the daughter she'd given poor emotional regulation skills too. She saw me as an object to control.
I felt that way in 2011, and I still feel that way today in 2023. The irony for me, fifteen months after this incident took place, I would be starting higher education. How can I be lambasted and punished for my existence one summer, and advanced to higher accolades the following fall?
Instead of talking with me in 2011, or having an age appropriate response, she sent me to live with my ex-step dad for three months. I don’t know if she knew what he had in store for me, but the next three months of my life as a fifteen year old, involved sleeping on the floor without any sort of padding for my leg injury. I wasn’t allowed to shower more than twice a week, wear clothes that fit my body, eat more than one ham & cheese sandwich per day, or go outside. I wasn’t allowed to talk to people, or write. I was only allowed to read four books, they were the first four of the Harry Potter series.
I’ve never wanted to touch those books again.?
After three months I communicated to a relative during a family gathering, the severity of the situation. Though I kept the worst parts to myself. Like the child porn I could hear him watching from the other room, while I couldn't sleep. That lived in my head rent free for almost a decade. After I spent a day locked in his truck while he watched movies near Eugene, I conjured up the strength to tell my aunt. The police were called somewhat soon, and I was given back to my mother via their intervention. She was initially upset with me for having the police involved, as if me seeking basic safety was a punishable offense, but after that she never asked what happened. She pretended like nothing had happened. She was great at that.?
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My physical injuries, they are what doctors, strangers and other adults paid attention to. The stories my mom would weave to encapture people, who rarely bothered to talk with me, the injured child, instead of listening to every word my mother said on "my behalf". The abuse that my mom hid under her roof and behind the shadows, it went unnoticed by 99% of people. She manipulated church programs, community programs, and the people around us, using my physical disability as a currency for sympathy. As a cloak for her wickedness. It was a grand illusion people couldn't, or wouldn't look past.
Yes, my basic needs were being met, but not much else. I never starved, but I was beaten, emotionally neglected, manipulated, and sexually abused by people I should’ve trusted.?
She had them fooled, the abuse made it extremely difficult for me to become a healthy person. I’m just getting here now, ten years later. After I hit a series of lows in 2019. After four years of therapy. After anger management. It didn’t help that she force medicated me with buspirone and Adderall, though my doctor prescribed it, the pills always made me sick. She didn’t care. I spent the better part of two years feeling like a zombie taking medication that didn’t work for me. As an adult, it’s now difficult for me to medicate my various diagnoses, it's still a work in progress. ?
Despite this I did excel in school, while I’m grateful for my education it’s ironic too given that I was trafficked by my mom to my professor in junior college. While I was in an accelerated program.?This incident will be the bulk of what I talk about in the chapters to come.
I survived being sex trafficked to several adult men as a teenager, but largely one, and he was an educator I should've trusted. I’m here today to shed light on my experience, and paint a picture of what human trafficking can look like in small-town Oregon and presumably, America. To paint a picture of the complexity that goes with unpacking abuse, the abuse of children from my perspective as a survivor. To talk about the difficulties that go with sever undiagnosed mental health issues as a new adult, as the consequence of child abuse.
This was a heavy prologue, and if you made it this far, thank you so much for sticking with me. Please follow my LinkedIn page to stay up to date with my writings.
I will be updating and publishing material as it is written. For my fellow domestic abuse and trafficking survivors, my messages are always open for peer to peer support.