My Experience with Child Abuse

Howdy, folks. So this article is going to be a difficult one for me to write, for obvious reasons. Trigger warnings for child abuse, suicide, homophobia and other things. So, to put it simply, this will be a tale of some of the child abuse I received whilst growing up. It’ll cover some of what happened to me at school, in my home life, and a bit of how it still affects me to this day. So as hard as it may be for you to read, keep in mind how hard it is for me to have to think about all of this and to put pen-to-paper, so to speak.

School Life

So, as many of you probably know, I attended a Southern Baptist school from Pre-K to the end of sixth grade, followed by a random evangelical school for junior high, and then a a Catholic high school until midway through my junior year. My Southern Baptist school was… interesting, to put it mildly. Firstly, it was obviously heavily Evangelical and Dominionist in nature. The Bible was taught as the literal word of God, and despite the subject — be it math, English, whatever — would almost always relate back to the Bible in some way.

We used A Beka Books and Bob Jones University Press books for every subject matter. For those of you who don’t know, both of those companies are extremely literalist right-wing Christian organizations. Our history text books, for instance, portrayed slave owners in the Antebellum South as primarily kind, caring people; only a few “bad apples” were responsible for abusing slaves, according to these books. They also described evolution as “throwing a toaster in the air and expecting it to be a giraffe when it hits the ground.” I didn’t learn what evolution actually was until high school. We were taught that women were inferior to men, and that men were natural leaders and women were supposed to be subordinate, docile, and content with their lot in life. I might add, by the way, that the ultramajority of teachers at this school (and every teacher I had while there) were women.

I was also regularly bullied in school. The other students knew I was pretty much a non-believer in everything we were being taught about the Bible, and realized early on that they could get away with bullying me, and that if I responded, I’d get in trouble instead of them. So kids would tease me, harass me, call me names. One even took my Game Boy and tried to smash it on the ground during one recess. When I shoved the kid, I got sent to detention and he got off scot-free . I’d also get blamed for things other kids did as well.

We were required to pledge allegiance to not only the American flag every morning, but to the Christian flag and the Bible as well. We were also required to pray as well as memorize Bible verses and be able to recite them from memory. Failure to pray would result in detention (or worse), while failure to memorize Bible verses would result in lower grades. As a rather smart-mouthed kid, I frequently got in trouble in school. I would refuse to pray, I would constantly question the validity of the Bible and what we were learning in class, and would generally misbehave. I spent quite a bit of time in detention, in which we were required to sit at a desk with our head down — no working on homework, eating, or anything else allowed.

When detention wasn’t enough (and for me, it never was), I would be sent to the principal’s office. You see, my parents had signed a waiver (which was required to attend the school) allowing the school to use corporal punishment against me. So what would happen is that the principal would ask me what had happened, ask my teacher what had happened, then proceed to tell me to bend over a chair. He’d then get out a paddle from behind his desk, and proceed to spank me with it as hard as he could. The principal wasn’t a small man — he was easily 6’4 ” and of a fairly decent build. The number of “swats” varied depending on what you had done and (as far as I could tell) what sort of mood he was in it at the time.

So, being a regular guest at the Principal’s office, I was hit quite a lot. It gets better, though! You see, after you were spanked, you were required to kneel down and pray with the principal and your teacher. You were forced — on penalty of more swats — to pray for Jesus to not only forgive you for whatever transgression you had committed, but also to forgive the principal and your teacher for having to hurt you .

It was a rather pernicious form of child abuse; not only would you be physically harmed by your attacker, but then you had to (on pain of more punishment) tell them you forgave them. Once, when we were kneeling down to pray after the spanking, I spat in the principal’s face and told him that he (please forgive the misogyny of young Rob) “swung like a girl.” Let’s just say that he didn’t appreciate that, my punishment was fairly severe, and in the end, I prayed to Jesus to forgive him for having to hit me multiple times.

Home Life

So, in addition to dealing with the aforementioned “issues” at school, I also was subjected to abuse at home . Some of you may have heard me talk about this before in other venues, but allow me to give a brief recap of some of my experiences. It’s important for me to note that my parents were divorced at this point, and my mom had primary custody of me, so all of this happened when I was visiting my dad. So, for starters, when I’d misbehave in the slightest, my dad would beat me with his belt. Get a bad grade? Belt. Get in trouble at school, which happened quite frequently? Belt. Do anything my dad didn’t like? Belt.

I once asked him to stop swearing so much around me and he proceeded to belt me so hard I had trouble sitting for the rest of the day. He was also a fan of hitting me. He once called my stepmom by the wrong name in front of me, and I thought this was hilarious, so I went and told her. She got furious with him, and so my dad proceeded to backhand me with his ring hand for “causing trouble”. This was far from the only time he did this, unfortunately .

One of the worst things he did to me happened when I broke my arm. We were at my uncle’s house for a BBQ, and I was running around playing with the neighborhood kids. While playing, I tripped and broke my arm. So one of the kids ran to get my dad, who was already well on his way to being drunk. My dad refused to come and get me, and told the kid to tell me to “just walk back over here”. So I had to walk the half mile or so back to where my father was, where he proceeded to grab my broken arm and ask what was wrong. I screamed, of course, and one of the more responsible adults had me ice my arm.

So my dad said he can take me to the hospital, but if he does, they’re going to have to give me a shot in my arm, and that if I didn’t go within a day or two they’d have to cut my arm off. Being a young kid (this was the first day of summer vacation after 3rd grade), I was 1) terrified of needles and 2) believed what he was telling me. So I told him I didn’t want to go to the hospital. Later that night, around 1 or 2 in the morning, the pain was so bad I woke him up and asked him to take me. He told me to “quit being such a whiny faggot” and go back to bed and he’d take me in the morning. So in the morning, we called my mother, who took me back home and to the hospital, where we discovered that I had a broken arm. Wonderful parenting, am I right?

So this all culminated in me finally getting a restraining order against my father, barring him from any further contact from me. I had two (male) cops strip me naked and inspect my body for bruises. They found quite a few. The problem is, no criminal action against him was possible. Why, you may be wondering? Well — remember how my school was allowed to engage in corporal punishment against me? This made it impossible to prove that my father had abused me, as the bruises could have come from school as well. So in the end, I was quite lucky to get the restraining order, given the lack of evidence I had.

The Here and Now

So obviously, all of this was rather traumatic and still affects me to this day. I learned early on to be very argumentative and not to trust authority figures — or anyone, for that matter. I was always on the defensive, because anyone could be out to hurt me. These attitudes carried over into my adult life, and are some of the things I am struggling the most to unlearn. I still get angry and defensive over slight things, and my immediate reaction to any sort of conflict is “nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure”. It takes a lot of willpower on my part not to flip out at the drop of a hat.

Child abuse can cause lasting damage that takes a lifetime to repair. My experiences with child abuse ended when I was about eleven, but they’re still affecting me nearly two decades later. Mocking child abuse or portraying it as “not a big deal” is hideous; it’s why I’m aghast at parents who support spanking or hitting their children. All corporal punishment ever taught me was how to get away with misbehaving and that there comes a point when punishments don’t matter anymore. I was impossible to discipline as a kid because I simply didn’t care about the consequences of my actions.

I’m still afraid to trust others to this day. It takes a lot for me to be willing to open up and let people in. Physical violence (or the threat thereof) makes me queasy and causes me to panic. It colors all of my friendships and relationships, to this day, and is constantly on my mind. It makes me question myself and my self-worth — if I’m a good person, then why did all of this stuff happen to me? Why was I so horribly treated? It still affects me nearly two decades later .

I don’t know if I’ll ever “get over” what happened to me as a child, but I am making progress on coping with it and coming to grips with what’s happened to me. If you’ve been abused as a child, remember that you’re not alone — there are (unfortunately) quite a lot of us out there. More importantly, remember that you didn’t deserve what was done to you, as hard as it might be to accept that.