Friday 11 January 2013

10 reasons why you might not say you've been abused

Today, the extent of Jimmy Savile's abusive behaviour is being made public. Over the last few months, as victims of Savile and his ilk have come forward to tell their story, one suspicious question has often been asked: "Why didn't they say anything earlier?" Here are 10 possible reasons (which also apply to non-celebrity abusers):

1. Back to BC

Before Childline was established in 1986, children were being abused all the time. Corporal punishment was allowed in most schools. Adults were assumed to have authority and be right; children were assumed to be mischievous (particularly boys, who were made of "slugs and snails and puppy-dogs' tails") and were to be seen and not heard. As a child, there was no institution on your side, nobody to tell at the time who would believe you.

2. The persistence of amnesia

If you never called in the first place, how can you recall? If you didn't say anything at or near the time, the memory of the event would not have been consolidated. It could easily drift into a dreamlike hinterland. Children, whose imaginations are prized above their intellect, are positively encouraged to live in a world that is significantly make-believe. Trauma is easily dismissed as nightmare. And even if after a decade or two the nightmares begin to make sense, it's no easy business to separate memory from myth.

3. When you're in a hole, stop digging

The human mind has evolved to protect itself from trauma. Some things are best forgotten, at least for the time being. Why keep picking mental scabs? You might leave well alone for decades, only to find that the scab gets disturbed, revealing an unhealed, possibly infected wound. This can be like the initial trauma coming back with accrued interest, pulling apart the fabric of your life and personality. So one might resort to denial, trying to put the demons back in the box, the genie back in the bottle.

4. Friendship is fragile

Some people won't stop talking when they're drunk. Start (and not stop) talking about your experience of child abuse and you soon realise how uncomfortable people are with the subject. Friendship ties and family bonds are not always as strong as you hope (though maybe not as weak as you fear).

5. NHS fail

Professional help can be extremely beneficial, but it can also be very difficult to get enough of the right sort without spending large amounts of money. Fifty minutes per week, for six weeks, is not enough. Longer and/or more frequent sessions can be vital in ensuring that people can open up without leaving the consulting room raw and exposed, stranded in a state of active breakdown.

6. Because you're [not] worth it

Using NHS or charity resources (let alone your own or your family's hard-earned cash) to have a series of chats ALL ABOUT YOU can seem like massive self-indulgence. It may take a friend, possibly after a night of ill-advised drunkenness, to persuade you to do what it takes to start making things better. Low self-esteem ties into both (a) the lack of respect that others (both abuser and bystander) have shown you and (b) the feeling that your suffering is somehow penance for your own guilt, based on the illusion of your consent or acquiescence to behaviour over which you had little or no control. You may even have been put in a state where you not only participated in but courted, instigated and actually fantasized about activity of which you are profoundly ashamed. You feel rejected by society at large, which wants to oversimplify the nature of innocence and violation, whereas, in fact, children are by nature programmed to seek out new experiences, to form synapses and build associations, to respond to touch, attention and smiles as much as fear and threat.

7. Abuse doesn't happen in a vacuum

Sometimes sexual abuse is as much a symptom of unhappiness as it is a cause. The odd, isolated, uncontented child is an easier target for the abuser. To come to terms with the abuse can entail confronting underlying family issues. You may spend years trying to avoid hurting people with home truths, possibly until the imminent possibility of your suicide, and the awareness of how much hurt that would cause, persuades you to bite the nettle by the horns.

8. It gets better, doesn't it?

So, your past may have been horrible, but that's how most fairy tales begin. All you need is to find the right frog to kiss it all better, right?


9. Change is tricky

You can't change the past; all you can do is understand it and change how the past affects the present. That changes you. That is scary. Your whole life may be built upon a false or incomplete narrative, a life which involves other people. If you change, maybe you will feel the need to escape and start anew, maybe friends and family will resent the changes. Renegotiating your life may not be easy.


10. It's probably too late to protect anyone

Jimmy Savile is dead. Many abusers are in their advanced years at the time of the abuse. By the time you are in a position to say anything, you may take comfort from the thought that your continued silence, at least as far as the authorities go, will not expose anyone else to similar danger. At long remove, there is no chance of identifying complete strangers. Those you can remember circumstantially may be theoretically traceable, but what's the point? The police won't do anything. Even if the abusers are alive, surely they'll be no threat by now. It's just not worth the risk of making your own present difficult if nobody else's future is at stake. (But then again, Savile is said to have been abusing in his eighties...)

Saturday 28 August 2010

Calling all sadists: pay for my pain!

On Sunday 5th September I will be running in the Great Scottish Run 10k. I have not run any appreciable distance since last year. 14 months. Last night, I ran from St Enoch's subway to the Polo Lounge (well, one doesn't wish to pay to get in): it took me an hour to get my breath back.
So now, sadists, this is your chance to enjoy my pain and suffering (and masochists can share in it vicariously). All I ask is a modest sum, say £10, towards the Refugee Survival Trust, in return for my near-death experience. You can visit my Just Giving page here: http://www.justgiving.com/chrisyoung1974

Saturday 31 July 2010

Why did I drink so much?

I recently had the pleasure of introducing the crowd at "Last Monday at Rio!" to a long-forgotten music hall classic. This song is at the tamer end of the repertoire of Mr George Foreplay, a pioneer in working class filth.

Why did I drink so much?

Why did I drink so much tonight?
It’s stretched my bladder really tight.
But now that I’ve gone to the loo
To do what a man’s got to do,
I can’t
Because I’m thinking of you.

Why did you turn me on tonight?
I cannot get the angle right.
When you kissed me, my passion grew;
Now it won’t do what I tell it to.
It won’t
Because it’s thinking of you.

I press upon it, flinch with pain,
And then the thing springs up again.
I look at it and scowl and frown
But cannot keep my good man down.
I plead with it, I swear and shout,
But cannot even form a spout.
I must concede my little friend
Will simply not agree to bend.

Why did I drink so much tonight?
I need to go, and soon I might,
Despite my aim not being true.
I’ve got to let the liquid through.
It’s hard
Because I’m thinking of you.

My cannon’s raised to launch attack
So I take several paces back
And try to guess its natural arc -
But it’s just slashing in the dark.
This pot-luck isn’t good at all -
I’m bound to wet the floor and wall,
The ceiling, and the bathroom mat.
And I don’t want t’have to clean all that.

Why did you turn me on tonight?
You didn’t get your timing right.
If you still want to bill and coo,
It’s something I’m not fit to do.
It’s pointless
To be thinking of you.

Well, normally I’d have no qualms
I’d take you right now in my arms
But there’s something I must do first -
And if I don’t do it soon, I’ll burst.
It’s agony that part of me
Defies the law of gravity.
If I could do a handstand, I
Would give gymnastic feats a try.

Why did I drink so much tonight?
It will not be a pretty sight.
My one-eyed chum is changing hue
Into a vivid shade of blue.
He is
Because he’s thinking of you.

To bring him under my control,
I stand then crouch with back to bowl.
I push and poke and waggle him
To try and get him past the rim.
But when I have got him to reach
I find the bowl is lined with bleach.
The fluid that kills all germs dead
Has killed my stamina instead.

Why did you turn me on tonight
When, just to make my bladder light
And save one skin, I’ve been forced to
Burn off another? Oh dear, oo!
Goodnight.
I won’t be thinking of you.

Wednesday 21 July 2010

Arguments & Nosebleeds at the Fringe

On Thursday 19th and Friday 20th August, I will be performing alongside Jane Overton, Alex Frew and Robin Cairns in an evening (well, an hour) of comedy performance poetry - for FREE (Laughing Horse Free Fringe). Time: 8.30-9.30pm. Laughing Horse @ Espionage (Venue 185) - Pravda Room, middle floor. (4 India Buildings, Victoria Street, Edinburgh  EH1 2EX. Entrances on Victoria Street and Cowgate.)
www.argumentsandnosebleeds.co.uk

Tuesday 20 July 2010

Music Hall Memories, 24 & 25 July

Shows at 1pm & 3pm both Saturday and Sunday @ Britannia Panopticon Music Hall, 113-117 Trongate, GLASGOW G1 5HD. Above Mitchells Amusements. Entrance via New Wynd.
Come and enjoy popular entertainment 1910-style in the world's oldest music hall. Magic, music, comedy and more. Chris will be appearing as Little Billy Williams. FREE - donations welcome!

Tuesday 9 March 2010

The arrogance and the ignorance...

I've just been watching a rather interesting edition of Horizon on BBC2, "Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong?". It details how little cosmologists actually know, and how so many conjectures, without any explanation or proof, have been assimilated into the "standard model" which purports to explain the universe. This gives me the perfect opportunity to show off my own insights in a poem I wrote a few years ago. It may be completely off the mark (I am not an astrophysicist), but maybe not...

Through a bottle, darkly

When we look back in time into the sky,
How do we know our lines of sight are ‘straight’?
Perhaps, through all our telescopes, we scry
A cosmos bending under its own weight.

Klein’s bottle is a never-ending loop
Where 3-D space curves inside-outside-in,
A four-dimension ‘Möbius hula-hoop’
With all points sitting on a single skin.

When we look back in time into the black,
Do we re-see the self-same points in space?
Does substance reappear along the track,
Back-formed and in its former time and place?

Dark energy and matter need not be
If all there is is less than we can see!

© Chris Young
Everything clearer now? Now all I have to do is explain why galaxies spin with near-uniform velocity despite relative distance from the centre and what exactly gravity is...

Sunday 21 February 2010

It's not the winning...

I have never won a poetry slam. By the end of tomorrow night, that will probably still be true. But I'll still give it a go. I will be joining my fellow poets at the Rio Cafe (Hyndland Street, Partick) from 8pm to perform two 2-minute poems in front of an expectant audience keen to get their money's worth (having got in for free). Three judges will award points for the quality of the writing, the performance and the audience response. The three highest-scoring competitors after the first two rounds will get a further 3 minutes each to fight it out for the prizes in the final.

I do this sort of thing quite a lot. Sometimes I get absolutely nowhere. Sometimes I get the audience completely on my side, and still get nowhere. Sometimes I get the audience on my side and the judges on my side, but end up just not quite managing to clinch it in the final. I know that lots of it is luck, but I also know that I need to raise my game to make the best of what luck I have. So, you'd have thought that by now I would have rehearsed my poems for tomorrow night at least a few dozen times. Well, you'd have thought that if you didn't know me.

It is ironic that one of the reasons I have not capitalised on my pole position in slam finals, according to a poet friend of mine, is that I don't appear to be "political". I do, in fact, have several poems which are of a political nature, but they tend to be either (a) not very good or (b) more stealthy or full-on funny than in-your-face earnest. This is my challenge for tonight: write two or three poems, preferably funny, at least one of which is overtly political. Wish me luck!

Yes, I sometimes use props and costumes...