an anonymous contribution

Statistics don't lie. People lie: statistics are just tools they use.

There are a lot of statistics waiting to be used for lies: I guess anyone who thinks can cite one or two particularly egregious examples. I can.

Eighty percent of all child abusers were abused as children. You've all hear that. It turns up in the media whenever a sensational case catches the pundits' attention. Eighty percent. So, blame the parents, blame genetics. Pity the child, s/he can't help it: s/he is doomed from birth.

There's one you never hear, though it had been around at least a decade, established by a very large study: 80% of abused children grow into adults who never abuse anyone. Same percentage, but it lacks the pathos, doesn't it? After all, you rarely hear about the adults who overcome abuse since, by and large, they spend all their lives getting on with it and keeping their heads down.

I am one of the 80% you have never heard of. Why have you never heard of me? Because I know that, as soon as you know who I am, you are going to see me a whole different way, to react as if I am a primed hand grenade just waiting for the right set of circumstances to explode. After all, abused children are doomed to repeat the cycle, right? So, despite the fact that you may have known me for years as a co-worker, a neighbour, a raquetball acquaintance, as soon as you discover my secret, you start shaking your beards, talking behind my back, distancing yourself. Maybe you have children, and you don't wan't them endangered. Maybe you just like the sense of tittilated righteousness it gives you.

Statistics don't lie. Abuse is a family affair. My father's family has been practising it through enough generations that you could argue for a genetic predisposition. In the last two generations, we have two outright murders, three chronically abusive families, one suicide, and any number of walking wounded.

But, all tolled, the last two generations adds up to sixteen individuals, not counting the ones who married in. Subtract one for the suicide: fifteen. Of those, three were violent, abusive, sociopathic personalities. Three. Three is 20% of fifteen. Statistically, eighty percent of the individuals, while perhaps among the walking wounded, are not abusive personalities. Bang on the norm.

That's not to say we are just like you. Assuming you see yourself as normal, whatever that is, you probably see us, when you see us, as a little different. Most of us are, and we know it -- it is how we manage to find each other in crowded bars and large organisations. Not that we are all different in the same way: there are a variety of adaptations that can get you through an abusive family situation. It's just that the adaptations you make when you are young tend to stick, and few of those useful to survival in life-and-death circumstances are really suitable to life in the mainstream.

So, quite a proportion of us are quiet people, hard to know, walled in. A number of others have sublimated their adaptations into artistic creativity. Some are outright eccentric. A good number are gay. There are a lot of obsessives, too, as well as a fair whack of geeks, nerds and dorks. Most are in some way socially maladept, and we are often perceived as, in some undefinable way, phony.

Absolutely. A lifetime of dealing with the prejudices and/or bone-headed do-gooding of the normal majority has taught us that, whatever we may have so fervently dreamed as children, there is no escape from the monster in the closet, the dragon at the door, the rats gnawing in our bellies. No matter how we try to escape the past, blend into the present, build some kind of future, we are doomed.

We are the children of Cain. We bear his mark. However hard we may try to hide it, sooner or later, someone will find out, and we will find ourselves backed into a corner while normal people poke sticks, throw stones, render judgement.

It isn't just history we have to hide. If it were, then the farther in the past our curséd ancestor faded, the safer it would be for us to emerge, to swim in that mainstream, to live like others do. But, the past corrupts the present and shadows the future. We can never relax. For some, it is the rats within, the daily struggle to contain the rage and terror have shut away in the deepest abyss we can create, the knowledge that we could some day, fail in that vigilance and fall into the very abyss we have created. For others, it is the knowledge that others: siblings, cousins, parents, companions; are poised on the razor edge, teetering, that some day, someone is going to fall. When one falls, the repercussions for the rest are painful and bitter. Someone we cared about, lost. Someone we tried to protect as a child, snatched by the past, by the terrors of the abyss, condemned by the natter of news media and gossips as a born loser, a monster.

Someone who blinked. Don't blink. Don't look. Don't tell. Who's next?

You can't begin to understand this. Sometimes, I think you are blessed in your ignorance. Others, I would love to grab you by the throat and force you to peek over the edge, to face what we do every time we wake up, to know what we have to contend with ever waking moment, just to earn the right to live with your smarmy smiles, your blind, self-righteous ignorance.

There. Look at that. Can you face it every day? Or even for one second?

Judge not.... but, you will, won't you? Every time you hear another sensational story, pick up a tittilating hint of gossip, every time one of us gives in to despair, stops struggling against eternal damnation, falls into the darkness that remains until it engulfs us. Every time one of us grows tired, just for a second. Blinks. Every time one of us believes that s/he is what you say, accepts the doom. Surrenders to the rage, the terror, and your need for someone to feel superior to.

I would say it doesn't have to be that way, but it does. I would say that, if you changed your attitudes to be less prurient and more accepting, it would be an incredible help in that daily struggle to escape the past and make a future. Would make a difference in those statistics.

But, that would be hopelessly idealistic. Everyone bears the mark of their lineage. Ours is the red cyclone of rage. Yours is the stiff neck of stupidity.

Because it is stupid, you know, really stupid, to torment a sleeping dragon. You might wake it up.

Try to remember, however many of you there might be, there are a lot more of us than you think. We have a lifetime's practise at rage. And a hell of a track record of survival.

Think about it.