The Working Poor (25 page)

Barbara wondered what kind of adult she would grow up to be. She was in and out of foster homes while her mother succumbed to alcoholism. “For a sweet little girl,” Barbara said, “she’s really screwed up. In her twenties she’ll be a survivor.”

A survivor. That was Barbara’s most hopeful prognosis, and she was almost right. At eighteen, the young woman was pregnant and unsure which of three men was the father.

A surprising number of women at the edge of poverty turn out to be survivors of sexual abuse. Like huge financial debt, their trauma weighs them down long after it occurs. Unlike debt, it cannot be erased by declaring bankruptcy. Their future is crippled by their past, which forces its way into their explanations of who they are, sometimes candidly in the first discussion, sometimes obliquely in the fourth or fifth encounter. Even though I never posed the question, sooner or later most of the impoverished women I interviewed mentioned that they had been sexually abused as children.

Only half an hour after I had met a young mother named Kara King, she told me her story. I had merely asked her about her family. “My father molested me as a child,” she said plainly. “My husband doesn’t know that. I was twelve. He fondled me over a year’s time. My father was drunk. I locked myself in my room. I woke up with him on top of me, I pushed him off. He said, ‘That’s the way a father and daughter are.’

“You know it’s not right,” Kara continued, “but you don’t know who to tell. I stayed at a friend’s house. I told my mother, and she said, ‘That’s OK, my father did that to me when he was drunk, but it won’t happen again.’ ”

When a woman discloses such intimate humiliation to a stranger, she reveals its magnitude. She cannot help tracing many of her handicaps to the legacy of disgrace and self-loathing imposed by her childhood assailants, and the disabilities can be life-altering: her unwise choices of male partners, her deep distrust, her emotional distance, her failure to form attachments. The abuse seems too central to conceal.

Sexual abuse afflicts all classes, all races. The more open societies in this more open era tend to discuss the problem more frankly, and so Americans have grown increasingly aware and alarmed. Victims have overcome their
misplaced shame to indict priests, uncles, family friends, and fathers. Yet much remains hidden, so the questions outnumber the answers. Are poor children any more vulnerable than rich? Do families lacking material means also lack the means to protect their children from such indelible harm? Is molestation more prevalent in disrupted households with single mothers, transitory boyfriends, alcohol, drugs, and absent adults working long hours in late-night shifts?

What is well known is that the trauma debilitates in ways consistent with handicaps frequently seen among the poor. A child who is sexually abused is invaded by a sense of helplessness. If that feeling continues into adulthood, as many victims testify it does, it may break the belief that life can be controlled. Lost is the very notion that real choice exists, that decisions taken now can make a difference later. A paralyzing powerlessness sets in, and that mixes corrosively with other adversities that deprive those in or near poverty of the ability to effect change.

Molestation in childhood damages the capacity for intimacy in adulthood, and thereby damages a household’s economic potential. About 53 percent of all poor families are headed by single women, and another 10 percent by single men, which means that 62 percent have only one wage-earner, a huge handicap at low rates of pay. The women, who usually end up caring for the children, may or may not receive adequate child support from the fathers.

Sexual abuse is one reason, among others, for the failure to create healthy partnerships. An abused child’s sense of powerlessness may lead to surrender and to a method of escape that psychiatrists term “dissociative,” in which the victim mentally stands aside watching the assault occur. The same phenomenon has been observed in victims of other trauma, including war. This out-of-body experience generates protective feelings of indifference and emotional detachment that can remain for years after the event, even for a lifetime. Children are especially vulnerable. “Repeated trauma in adult life erodes the structure of the personality already formed,” notes Dr. Judith Lewis Herman, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, “but repeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality.”

The survivor’s intimate relationships are driven by the hunger for protection and care and are haunted by the fear of abandonment or exploitation. In a quest for rescue, she may seek out powerful authority figures who seem to offer the promise of a special
caretaking relationship. By idealizing the person to whom she becomes attached, she attempts to keep at bay the constant fear of being either dominated or betrayed.

Inevitably, however, the chosen person fails to live up to her fantastic expectations. When disappointed, she may furiously denigrate the same person whom she so recently adored. Ordinary interpersonal conflicts may provoke intense anxiety, depression, or rage. In the mind of the survivor, even minor slights evoke past experiences of callous neglect, and minor hurts evoke past experiences of deliberate cruelty.… Thus the survivor develops a pattern of intense, unstable relationships, repeatedly enacting dramas of rescue, injustice, and betrayal.
¹

Abuse in various forms may lead to early sexual involvement. One study found that “emotional deprivation, particularly at an early age, may predispose adolescents to seek emotional closeness through sexual activity and early parenthood.”
²
Another, based on a sample of 1,026 young African-American women in Memphis, found that while nonsexual physical abuse had no correlation with early pregnancy, sexual abuse did. Girls who had been molested as small children tended to have consensual intercourse at a slightly younger age (a mean of 14.9 versus 15.6 years old), and they became pregnant earlier (at i6.7versus 17.4). “Clinicians should consider a report of child sexual abuse from an adolescent to be a red flag for early sexual activity,” the report concluded. “Such adolescents should receive appropriate family planning counseling and be referred for mental health counseling to reduce the risk of premature pregnancy.”
³
They should be, but they rarely are, especially if they’re poor.

Among low-income families, then, sexual abuse emerges as one mechanism transmitting poverty to the next generation. Abuse occurs among the affluent too, but the well-to-do have other mechanisms to propel their children forward despite what happens inside their own suffering. Parental ambition and high expectations, the pressure to succeed, the access to education, the drive for professional achievement all add up to a sense of entitlement and opportunity. Survivors often engage in anxiety-ridden efforts to please, which in certain families means excellent academic performance.

The dynamics can be quite different in low-income families, where the abuse is added to a pileup of multiple stresses. Overall, one in four or five girls is sexually abused, researchers estimate from polling, but the percentage
may run higher among low-income single mothers. Journalists covering welfare reform have encountered many poor women who mention being sexually abused, seeking protection from their mothers and being disbelieved, having their sense of safety shredded and the refuge of their home undone. One white reporter who had written on the subject looked confused when I told him about the girl on the swing in New England. But was she white? he asked. Yes, I said, it was practically an all-white town. Kara King and many of the other women who had talked with me about having been abused were white. Well, he confessed, he’d thought the problem had something to do with black culture. He seemed taken aback by his own prejudice.

Wendy Waxler, just off welfare in Washington, D.C., had finished outlining her tight budget during our second conversation when she began to talk about the assaults that were woven into her childhood memories. Nearly thirty years had passed, and she was now determined to mask the scars by forcing herself to recover from failure, to work hard, laugh hard, and be a model to her handicapped daughter.

She knew nothing of her biological mother, only of the two foster homes where she had spent her first four years. “They believed in beating us for every little thing,” she said of that initial family. “They had this two-year-old. She was a foster child, too.… I remember one day; it comes like it’s a reoccurring dream. It’s like it won’t let me forget. [The foster mother] took the little girl down in the basement and beat her. I think the little girl peed on herself or something, and she got mad ’cause she got to clean it up. All of a sudden, I couldn’t hear no more screaming. The lady came upstairs, but the baby didn’t. I got scared, and I guess she saw the expression on my face. She said, ‘What, you don’t want to be here anymore?’ And I think I told her no. She told them people to come get me, and they did, and I went to the next foster home.” Wendy never learned whether the little girl had lived or died.

The second family provided no sanctuary. They had another foster child, Paula, and two teenage sons who ran loose and free. “These boys used to take me and Paula in the basement, pull down our panties, and do—.” Wendy couldn’t finish her sentence. “Stuff like that you never forget, I don’t care how old you get. You never forget. Until the day you die, you never forget.”

Again she was rescued, this time when she was adopted by a divorcée without children. “By the time she got me she said I looked anorexic,” We ndy recalled. “She said my hair was all over the place, my clothes were dirty, and she said my teeth were green. She said it was a wonder they were still in my mouth. She said, ‘I saved you.’ ”

But not from everything, it turned out. When her adoptive mother regularly dropped her off with a baby-sitter, Wendy was often left alone with the baby-sitter’s sons. “They used to do the same thing,” Wendy remembered, “take me in the bathroom or whatever, make me do weird things.… That was the first and only time I experienced anal sex. I think I was in second grade.… And my mother never believed me. She didn’t believe me. Thought I was lying ’cause when she asked the lady, the lady didn’t know anything about it.”

Like many abused women, Wendy had trouble with men, with intimacy, with trust and love. Her mother struggled mightily to keep her off the fast track to poverty so frequently taken by teenagers who get pregnant, have babies out of wedlock, drop out of school, hook up with abusive men, go on and off welfare, drift in and out of low-wage jobs. Her mother expected her to go to college, and Wendy had been accepted by Howard University when, on her high school graduation day, she learned that she was pregnant. She was terrified of telling her mother, and once she did, her mother insisted on an abortion.

We ndy resisted, then reluctantly went ahead. She had been carrying twins, she was told later. “After the surgery I turned around, and there’s a jar with these body parts all in it,” she remembered vividly. “I felt that was really cruel, because if you’re gonna have me go through something like that, don’t leave the result right there.” A chasm of disrespect opened between Wendy and her mother.

Each pregnancy ended badly, like each relationship. Neither could be brought to fruition; for many years there was no birth or marriage, no successful pregnancy or loving partnership. A baby was stillborn. An engagement was ended by Wendy when the man hit her. Because she feared that another baby would die, that she would suffer and fail without support, she had two more abortions. Alone, estranged from her adoptive mother, and financially fragile, she could not afford Howard’s tuition, transferred to the University of the District of Columbia, and dropped out before getting her degree. Then she met another man she wanted to marry—and cancelled the ceremony when she found his flaw. “It was like a week before the
wedding,” Wendy said. “It turned out he was on drugs, and I had to let him go. But I still had the baby in my stomach. I ended up losing the baby, the baby died. That baby lived for eight hours and died.”

She had worked odd jobs at US Airways, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and elsewhere, but she couldn’t make enough to keep her own housing. Moving in and out with men, she was occasionally homeless, living in shelters. She got pregnant again and decided this time that even without the father’s committed caring, she would have the baby. “I said if I get rid of her, I’ll never forgive myself. If I let this happen again. And I made that promise to never to do this again. And I had to tell myself: Stop running. The fear should be over now. Handle this. The whole time I was pregnant, regardless of what happens, I was gonna love this child and take care of this child.”

The child, a girl she named Kiara, came three months early and weighed two pounds one ounce, born at D.C. General Hospital when Wendy was staying in a shelter. “Because I was homeless, they treated me like I was dirt,” she said. “The nurses acted like I didn’t know anything, I was a dumb so-and-so from the street.” She spoke up for herself and insisted on respect. She didn’t get it.

Her daughter’s birth was not a happy event. “Because she was coming so early, they tried to tell me I wasn’t having contractions. I had contractions for three days. They tried to tell me I didn’t know what I was talking about, that I had an infection. And I told them if I had an infection and I been taking this medication for this infection for three days, why is it still up there? … They all hooked me up to the monitor and left. I couldn’t page the nurses. For one thing the equipment wasn’t working. They didn’t come check to make sure I was OK. And I had to actually take both monitors, wrap a blanket around me, go in the hall, go all the way down the hall to the nurses’ station and say, ‘Excuse me, I’ve been calling you for three hours. I need more lubrication for the baby’s heart monitor—the beeping from this monitor is driving me crazy. I’m having contractions. I need somebody to check and make sure everything is OK.’ You know.

“A nd they said, ‘Why are you in the hallway?’

“I said, ‘Because I’ve been trying to get your attention. I’ve been yelling. I shouldn’t have been yelling.’ … I said, ‘You treat me like I’m a paying patient, OK?’ And this went on until she was born.… See, that’s the way they treat people who don’t have money.”