End the Silence: How Speaking the Unspeakable Can Help Abuse Victims Begin to Manage the Trauma

RANDOLPH, Mass. - July 7, 2014 - PRLog -- What do Matilda Joslyn Gage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Virginia Woolf, Sylva Plath, Ann Sexton, Gloria Anzaldúa, Tillie Olsen, Adrienne Rich, Mary Daily, Nuala O'Faolain, and Andrea Dworkin have in common? "They are women who refuse to be silenced," says Philip Foley, publisher of Breaking Through Silence: A No-Nonsense Love Letter to Women (written by his wife, Kathleen Hoy Foley). "These women persevered through tremendous challenges to record what they knew to be true. For daring to speak, many were shunned, ridiculed, and worse. Some took their own lives. Their potent candor, their courage to write what they knew would generate serious repercussions, and their powerful voices have sustained and encouraged my wife, Kathleen, and other abuse victims."

Philip Foley, a retired Trenton Police Department Lieutenant and current investigator for the State of New Jersey, is the public voice of Women In Hiding Press. He points out that these women aren't alone, and abuse isn't a problem of the past. Abuse is an ongoing problem, whether it's sexual, physical, or emotional, and so many women -- whether they admit it (even to themselves) or not -- suffer from unresolved trauma.

Society wrongly regards this abuse as unspeakable, Foley points out. But the only way to manage the trauma is to speak the unspeakable. "Victims need to free themselves from the burden of healing and forgiveness imposed by society. To begin, they need help in identifying and understanding the lifelong impact of the abuse they endured."

Too often, women protect their attackers because of imposed cultural and societal dictates. They protect a husband, uncle, family friend, or cousin who abused them. To betray a person they're supposed to love often results in financial and emotional abandonment, so they keep their toxic secrets and live with the humiliation and the pain.

His wife, Kathleen, was a victim of emotional, physical and sexual abuse for more than a year and a half and was impregnated by rape. She never understood that her ordeal was abuse or rape. "Imagine...she never knew it! For over thirty-five years, she had no perspective, or factual definition, or external comprehension of her 'dark years.' Her personal and emotional boundaries lay destroyed by parental, religious, and cultural authorities, and she lived resigned to their demands and crumbled beneath the power lorded over her and against her."

Kathleen's silent torment does not have to exist for any girl, or any woman, but it does. From his wife's experience, Philip Foley understands that it's vital for victims to give a name to what happened. "You must use the words. Claim the authority to speak the words: Abuse. Rape."

And women shouldn't feel alone in their quest to end the violence. "Men must be full partners in stopping sexual violence," Foley insists. "We're seeing a good beginning with this presidential administration. President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have made it a priority to find ways to encourage more men to intervene when they see an attack, or to report assaults, on college campuses. But it must go even farther than that. It must go beyond college campuses and into our homes. Men can not stand by silently and expect that this epidemic of the sexual violence will be stopped by the authorities, the professionals, and the church!"

Foley concludes, "Legislators must create laws that provide victim status to all traumatized girls and women. Under those laws, victims must have the ability to use intermediaries, in addition to legal representation, during the criminal justice process. Many victims are additionally traumatized by the process itself, and intermediaries can help ease the pain. The arbitrary social criteria for rape and abuse -- such as that she didn't scream, or she was drinking, or there wasn't a visible bruise on her -- must give way to acknowledgement that abuse is abuse, and every victim is entitled to having the sexual trauma she endured validated."

Breaking Through Silence: A No-Nonsense Love Letter to Women
By Kathleen Hoy Foley
Women in Hiding Press
www.womeninhidingpress.org
ISBN: 978-0-9828558-2-9

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