Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

examinations were getting easier, b) that girls did easy subjects like languages while boys did the hard subjects of mathematics and physics, and c) that girls were causing the boys to do badly because their success humiliated the boys. David Blunkett, then the Secretary of State for Education, agreed with this last point. Blunkett showed himself to be a man of tradition. In discussions about corporal punishment he would say that he had slapped his sons when they were children, and he knew that they had suffered no harm.

      Being assertive means standing up for oneself, and standing up for oneself is usually a response to a situation which leads one to be angry. If a woman feels that she cannot afford to be seen to be angry, she may try to give up feeling angry.

      However, giving up anger is as sensible as giving up breathing, and just as easily done. Women may give up the social expression of anger, and they may even deny its existence to such an extent that they never consciously feel angry, but the unexpressed anger is there, and it takes its toll. The preponderance of depressed women has more to do with what they do with their anger than what their hormones do to them. Many men prefer to explain a woman’s depression in terms of hormones rather than anger, for the second explanation involves a recognition that women have a right to anger, just as a man has. Of course, there are many women who feel, and express, a powerful anger, but, as they cannot direct this anger at its true source, the conditions of their lives, they express it against the only objects available to them, their children. Many of us come to adulthood bearing on our soul, if not our body, the scars of the blows our mother’s anger dealt us, and many of us, unable to retaliate when we were children, take out our anger with our mother on our own children. Thus do the sins of the mother get visited on the children.

      In dealing with her children in this way, a mother treats them simply as objects, something with which she can express her passion, like the door she slams or the plate she hurls at the wall. One way in which children can survive these painful, frightening, unjust events is to turn themselves into objects. ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me’, we might have chanted defiantly to ourselves in order to summon the courage to survive, encasing ourselves in a metal box, on the outside of which the wicked witch’s blows and curses rained without effect.

      Girls are not as efficient as boys in turning themselves into objects so as to protect themselves from a parent’s anger. Since boys are encouraged from their earliest days to take part in rough-and-tumble games, while girls are discouraged from climbing, jumping and fighting, boys have more experience in how to develop techniques for avoiding or minimizing physical pain. Some years ago many Australian girls became weary of being expected to sit on the beach admiring the boys’ prowess on their surfboards and instead acquired their own boards and learned to surf. Similarly in the UK many girls got weary of having to cheer the boys’ football teams and instead got their own football kit and formed their own teams. However, research shows that, while girls on the whole are keen on sport in junior school, once they enter secondary school their interest wanes. They believe that girls who play sport are not seen to be feminine. This view reflects that of society. Women’s sport receives only a fraction of the government finance and sponsorship deals that men’s sport receives, while the media show scant interest in reporting it.

      Since an essential part of femininity is being sensitive to what another person says and does, girls remain vulnerable to their mother’s angry abuse and insults, while a boy who is learning how to be a traditional man is learning to devalue such sensitivity. At around five or six a boy usually develops a peculiar functional deafness which renders him incapable of hearing his mother’s voice except for certain phrases, ranging from ‘Do you want an ice cream?’, through ‘How much money do you need?’ to ‘Here’s my keys. You drive.’ Many boys who receive a great deal of physical punishment learn to take great pride in the amount of punishment they can take without showing any pain or fear. Many boys not only make their closest relationships with machines, but they come to think of themselves as a machine - hard, logical, efficient, powerful, unaffected by emotional confusion and doubt.

      The processes by which a girl learns to be feminine and a boy masculine require that each gives up vital parts of his or her self. Boys must give up those parts of themselves which might be labelled feminine, and girls those parts of themselves which might be labelled masculine. Having been forced to relinquish parts of ourselves which we valued (we begin our lives by valuing every part of us, and we no more want to give up part of our potentiality than we want to give up an arm or a leg), we envy those people who have what we have lost. Thus men envy women, and women envy men not their penises, those curious appendages which always make women laugh, but the power and freedom which men have. Many men, however, long for what they see as the security and gentleness of a woman’s life, but are afraid to claim this as their own, clinging instead to women and hoping to share their good fortune. The woman may similarly be clinging to a man in the hope of sharing his power and freedom. On such misunderstandings are so many marriages made.

      These are the ordinary patterns of life for most boys and girls, but for some children the extraordinary occurs.

      On the whole, life for a child in the developed world is the best it has ever been in human history. Children are no longer required to work at a very early age, schooling is relatively humane, and most children are reasonably well fed, clothed and housed, and are not routinely beaten. However, the history of childhood is one of misery and tragedy. Adults have always regarded children as possessions which they could use and abuse.³³ This abuse was both physical and sexual. Physical abuse was seen as essential for the education of the child, while the sexual abuse was hidden by a conspiracy of silence.

      When Freud embarked upon the unusual method of actually listening to his patients, he found that many of them recounted stories of sexual abuse in their childhood. He developed his theory that sexual abuse lay at the root of much neurosis, but later he revised his ideas and said that the prime cause of neurosis was the young child’s sexual fantasies directed at its parents. So attached did Freud become to this theory that he not only ignored actual sexual abuse but also the physical abuse his patients suffered in childhood.³⁴ When Jeffrey Masson, who had access to the Freud archives, wrote about Freud’s change of theory and described the reasons for this change as politic, not scientific,³⁵ all hell broke loose in the psychoanalytic community. Jeffrey Masson and all his works became anathema for all Freudian disciples. But what better way was there to protect abusive adults than to say that anyone who told of being abused in childhood was merely reporting childish fantasies?

      A number of members of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s were very critical of psychoanalysis, saying that Freud had not understood women and consequently belittled them. Some women now felt strong enough to speak publicly about their experiences of sexual abuse in childhood, and a number of books were published in which the writers revealed their experiences and described the long-term effects of these experiences.³⁶ However, it was not until the late 1980s that the seriousness of sexual abuse began to be recognized by the mental health professions. Many mental health professionals were reluctant to change their theories about mental illness because to do so meant changing significant parts of their meaning structure, and this required courage. Other mental health professionals who were highly critical of the psychiatric system quickly saw how important it was to acknowledge the seriousness of the problem. Lucy Johnstone, in her excellent book Users and Abusers of Psychiatry, wrote:

      Surveys indicate that about one in eight women are victims of sexual abuse in childhood, with the figure rising to as much as 50 per cent in women who use psychiatric services. Among the recognised long-term consequences are eating disorders, substance abuse, self-harm, anxiety and depression, as well as more general difficulties with relationships, self-esteem and sexuality. Women with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder often report a history of child sexual abuse as well.³⁷

      Therapists had to find a new way of working with clients who had been sexually abused. Some therapists in the USA developed the practice of advising