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Flashback: My father in his dark room, with my older sister, teaching her how to develop photos while doing things to her that she has only now in her seventieth year told me.

The dark room faced the kitchen, the busiest room in the house. We were a door away. My mother cooking, my sisters and I playing with our dolls on top of the grey army blanket, under the kitchen table, my brothers running in and out from the back room, and not one of us realised, or had we realised, no one did a thing about it.

Forced into complicity and denial by the silence of those times.

When the #MeToo movement came to my attention, well after 2006 when the expression was first made public to give voice to women and girls of colour, I joined the throng of white women on Facebook and put up my small contribution.

I wrote of a man I met in childhood while scavenging in the tip under the railway bridge in Camberwell. A man, tall and indistinct, wearing clothes that were unsuitable for scavenging. As the sun shone down on us, out of the shadows a man appeared. In a business suit. Not the clothes of a scavenger. Whenever my brother was out of sight, the man offered what looked like a silver coin to us girls. It glinted in the sunlight. With one hand he held the coin aloft and with his other he jiggled his penis in a beckoning motion.

‘Come here,’ little girl, he seemed to say, ‘I have something for you’. My brother had disappeared over a hill for the umpteenth time when the man beckoned once more. I accepted his offer, though hazardous, because I wanted the money.

My shy, younger sister held back while I went over to him.

‘Hold this,’ the man said, ‘and watch the cream come out.’ In the dissociated state of one who knows what she is doing is wrong yet urged on by my childish greed for money and the lollies it would buy, I took hold of the man’s hard penis, warm in my small fingers.

I did not need to shake it for long before the man’s body shuddered and out came the cream, a thick stream, into an empty paint tin strategically placed between us. After it was over the man gave me the coin, wiped his penis with a hanky, tucked it behind his zippered fly and walked away. In no time my brother returned, and we were off to the milk bar to spend the money I had earned. But not until I fended off my brother’s curiosity about the money as a lucky find.

This whole event must have troubled me because it stays in my memory. For two reasons, I suspect. One related to my mother’s response when I told her about the man and the money and the penis and the cream that came out. I told her the next day while we sat alone at the kitchen table after breakfast—a rare occurrence in the large family of my childhood. We had been toasting bread on the end of forks. Forks we held over the top of the single bar radiator that warmed our kitchen, near enough to the glowing bar to crisp the bread to a light brown, but not so close it could burn black.

‘I held a man’s thing and watched the cream come out,’ I said in my bravest voice. My mother looked up from the newspaper spread across her lap. She brushed away the scraps scattered there and plunged a finger down her cleavage to dislodge any loose crumbs.

‘Take this to confession’ she said. As if this was both a solution to any concern I might have felt, and also a sign I had done something wrong. Or perhaps she had forgotten I was a child. As if in accepting money, I had become a sex worker who trades sexual acts for monetary reward.

All this comes to me in hindsight. In this way, young girls of my generation, or at least those of us baptised Catholics, learned to deal with the sexual desires of men.

The second reason why I remember this event and why I might have participated more willingly than another child rests in my knowledge that my father was visiting my older sister in her bed at night and doing similar things with his penis, or so I imagined, though I never dared to look.

Late at night, I heard my father pad into our bedroom on bare feet and turned to face the wall. My sister slept in a bed parallel to mine with a small corridor in between. My father tiptoed along this corridor and leaned over her. The rustle of blankets, his murmurs, soft sighs and it was over. In the mornings my sister said nothing. Though she took to climbing out the window just as day broke and went off to church to attend Mass and then to visit the priest. At the time, I thought she was excessively holy. 

In the sacristy behind the church, when my sister met the priest, he took her into his arms and comforted her in ways that seemed much kinder than our father’s, or so my sister told me years later when she gave me permission to write her story, in so far as it hinges on mine. When my sister told the priest what our father was doing to her in bed at night, he said, ‘Some fathers are like that’ and proceeded to do the same.

The church was another place where my friends and I were wary of priests. Some were creepy, like Father Flynn, who offered religious instruction when I was thirteen, and who insisted whatever teacher in charge leaves the room while he instructed.

‘Do you know the meaning of the word procreation?’ Father Flynn asked once during his class, as though we were still in grade three and didn’t have a clue. He chose words from the bible that had a salacious ring, despite their formality, words like ‘virginity’ and ‘promiscuity’, and the stuff that happened in Gomorrah. We sat wriggling in our seats, desperate to leave yet powerful in our group cohesiveness. Somehow confident we would be safe with one scrawny, bald-headed man who shuffled on the balls of his feet as if to give him greater height whenever he introduced a new word.

‘You’re welcome to visit me later girls, to speak in private if you wish.’ He turned to wipe the words ‘womb’ and ‘prodigal’ from the blackboard, to hide his lesson from the nuns.

Father Flynn lived over the road from our school in the presbytery of St Ignatius Church. He was a Jesuit, one of the top priests for education, my brothers told me. The Jesuits were also the geniuses of the church, according to my brothers, but to me, Father Flynn was no genius, just a creepy old man who wanted to get something we girls would not give him.

Beyond the lecherous priests we avoided, there were other ones we couldn’t get enough of. Like our curate in Our Lady of Good Council in Deepdene, a younger priest than the one who headed the parish. A priest who spoke in the lilting tones of the Irish, a man who took an interest in my family, and stirred up all manner of unspoken desires in my young self, even during what Freud describes as the latency period – from around age six to puberty – where all thoughts of sexual desire are supposed to be dormant.

Not for me, I was hot with it. I did not know then that the Irish priest was the one ‘comforting’ my sister in the sacristy after Mass.

Hot with desire, at night, I slid under the sheets (on the nights my father did not visit my sister) and imagined myself as the luscious Maid Marion awaiting the ravaging Sherriff of Nottingham. I was confident that Robin Hood would arrive in the nick of time and take me to another place in the forest where he too would ravage me, but not in an unwelcome way. I rubbed at my imaginary breasts not yet developed, but did not touch the bottom half of my body. It was an unclean place, too close to the stuff that went into the toilet. I was tormented by guilt for the impurity of my thoughts.

The nuns taught us about impure thoughts during religious instruction. Impure thoughts were the worst and must be confessed to the priest, for fear of accidental death and direct to hell. Mortal sins. I carried many such sins in my tortured mind as a child. Those unwanted impure thoughts gave me pleasure but horrified me at the filthy state of my soul. It was lodged someplace down below in my body, somewhere under my stomach and too close to my bowels for comfort.

In 2019 I responded to a call for papers from an academic journal that asked several questions related to the MeToo# Movement: This one caught my eye:

Do narratives of sexual violence linked across people, media, and time disrupt our understanding of single stories of individual injury?

Such a good question and one I try to address here. Yet how do I link my own experience of sexual abuse to the universal without watering it down or solipsising?

Sexual violence runs the risk of becoming what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls the single story. One that ‘robs people of humanity’. It becomes a narrow view of that most complex of human emotions, the proclivity towards violence directed against another, an impulse that begins in infancy when a baby is frustrated but powerless to exert any influence on its caregivers other than seeking a response to its cries. Put an infant who cannot learn to handle those impulses into an adult, especially an immature male adult overtaken by rage, and violence can ensue.

Sexualised violence is so named, not because it is about sexuality itself; more it’s about power and the way sex is used to demean another, as in rape. Add to this the overriding message from the pornographic industry that women enjoy being demeaned. I don’t, despite my childhood fantasies of being ravished by the Sherriff of Nottingham.

As the psychoanalyst Muriel Dimen argues, sex is hard for everyone to think about, not just those with a history of childhood sexual abuse. On top of this, perceptions of whether something deemed sexual is desirable or unacceptable, change from one generation to the next and within different cultures. In some cultures, for instance payment for sex is frowned upon. In others, it is applauded. The confusion between sex and violence, sex and the desire for power can confound us further.

Our stories are diverse and not singular. We can become so immersed in a narrow image in our minds that sexual violence becomes one thing only: a fist raised about to thump a cowering woman, or a would-be rapist hiding in the bushes ready to attack an unexpecting passer-by. Furthermore, we are particularly vulnerable and impressionable to the power of stories as children. Stories that aim to help us understand our world, better filtered through the magic of fairy tales and allegory. But through these universalities, stereotypes can evolve, and stereotyping is dangerous.

Stereotypes tend to diminish and dehumanise us as people. We use them defensively to protect ourselves from the unfamiliar. Telling our stories in all their multiplicity helps us take a broader look at the many stories of sexual violence that beset us. My story and yours, in all their complexity. The #MeToo movement has offered many women a platform from which to speak, but the hashtag also lends itself to a type of massification. As if every individual story is somehow condensed into a stereotype of sexual abuse, one that fails to recognise the complexity of our individual stories. At the same time, MeToo# allows for more and more stories. Is there a danger that comparisons distort? Your story is worse than mine. As happened in my family of nine children, each of us with our own experience of living in this paradoxically sexualised and simultaneously repressed Catholic family with our abusive father at the helm.

As a psychotherapist, I work with women whose experience of sexual abuse pales in comparison to mine. Women who have known the terror of rape, the cruelty of having their child bodies taken from them by men who have treated them as though they were merely receptacles for their sexual fantasies. These men, my father included, the man at the tip, the lecherous priests, these men have taught us women shame. They taught us to hide our bodies, to hide ourselves, to hide our desires even from ourselves.

I have become obsessed with matters such as these. The way the men I watch on trains sit with legs akimbo, and the women with thighs squeezed together. I sit in my consulting room, knees crossed even though I know it is not good for my spine. I train myself to sit straight, with knees pressed together, while the man opposite, a good enough person who has come for help in dealing with his anxieties, sits legs wide open. And although I say nothing about it to him, I find myself wondering when and where this imposed postural positioning of men and women started.

We women have learned early about how to sit and how to stand and how to walk so that we will not be like the women whom the serial killer Ted Bundy described. He claimed he could tell a victim by the way she walked. Always a ‘she’.

In this day of more fluid gender positions, wherein people are beginning to challenge the straightforward notion that we are simply one or another sex, is there hope for change?

What drove my father to use my sister as his sexual plaything? What led him to conclude it was okay to go under the cover of darkness to masturbate her and ask her to masturbate him?

What gave him the idea it was okay for him to talk to her about his wish to prepare her for womanhood; to make her ready for her husband when she came of age, to stretch her vagina so that it could be ready to receive her man?

What drove such confusion and madness in my father’s mind that it was okay for him to treat all his daughters as though they were potential partners; to talk dirty to all and any of us; to say things at an Easter lunch to my aunt about her breasts. He was drunk that day, and my aunt blushed, but not one of my uncles told my father he was out of line, or if they did, they did it quietly and no fuss ensued.

What gave my father the view that his children and wife were his to possess in this way, such that we were his sexual objects, there for his amusement?

What led the priests to believe they too could do as they pleased with certain people in their care?

Was it merely a wish to control? The power to subject a vulnerable person and get them to bend to their will? So many people who have been sexually abused as children report their confusion and distress, their guilt and self-loathing at the fact that they were aroused by the experience.

And what of the difference between desire and arousal?

It is worth noting that arousal is a physiologic response to stimulation. Being masturbated can give a boy an erection and cause a girl to lubricate involuntarily, even without any conscious desire. Is it a case that the adult imposes their desire on the child and the child is taken over?

My focus is on the issue of gender-based violence, which relates most closely to the objectification of women’s bodies and the degree to which women, as Iris Marion Young writes in her essay ‘Throwing like a girl’, tend to be self-conscious and cautious with their bodies, thereby feeling less certain about themselves. Men and women inhabit their bodies differently. According to Young, society conditions women to limit their bodily capacities, and to take up less space. Part of this sense of female fragility and diminishment comes out of the objectification of women as mere sexual and biological beings.

In a paper entitled ‘Why you shouldn’t tell that random girl on the street that she’s hot’, Miriam Mogolovsky writes about the common assumption certain men have when they comment on women’s appearance; that it’s okay, especially when their comments are seemingly positive, even though uninvited – similar to the tendency of some people, both men and women, to touch the swollen belly of a pregnant woman uninvited. It relates perhaps to the infantile and omnipotent notion of ownership of the mother, which fuels the belief some hold, however unconsciously, that they are entitled to women’s bodies.  

Furthermore, gender inequality comes out of language. As Jackson Katz, in his 2013 TED talk, tells us it is easy to exclude men from conversations on how to decrease violence against women. It’s also easy to get into victim blaming. Katz argues we need to ask different questions like:

‘Why is domestic violence still a big problem?’

‘Why do so many men abuse physically, emotionally, verbally and in other ways, the ones they love?’

‘What’s going on with men?’

‘Why do so many adult men sexually abuse little girls and boys?’

‘Why is the sexual abuse of children such a common problem in our society?’

‘Why do so many men rape women in our society, or why rape other men?’

‘What’s the role of institutions that help produce abusive men? The religious, sporting, pornographic, class, race etc.’  

The fault does not lie entirely with the perpetrators or the victims alone, Katz argues. It also rests with the bystanders, those people like you and me and others, those who represent the institutions. 

How then can we be transformative? One way is to adopt what Katz calls the bystander approach, namely call out the abusive behaviour when you see it. Stop shooting the messenger; shouting down the women who complain about it. Encourage men who are not abusive to speak out against men who are.

To quote Samuel Jones on the constructed nature of gender:

There is a generation of young men out there, who are sick of being told to “man up”, who tire of the patronising way they’re treated by the advertising industry and who hate the fear of being ostracised by many of their peers if they don’t participate in “banter” or acquiesce to social pressures to objectify women. Those for whom “being a man” is a daily burden.

Women are not the only ones to benefit from feminism.

For me, as a witness to the abuse, and someone who made it my aim to avoid my father as much as I could, I was doubly confused. I was jealous of my sister that my father chose her. I was jealous of my sister that the priests chose her, too. I wanted to be chosen. I wanted to be wanted. To be wanted in this way, singled me out as special.

That I wanted to avoid my father at the same time and freaked out at the thought of being touched by any of the grownups, even a friendly hug from an aunt or uncle, pulled me in opposing directions. How awful that touch should feel dangerous. That touch could be experienced as an invasion. And so, I learned to hold myself tight against any intrusions from the outside world, including, in some instances, new knowledge.

My oldest brother once wrote what I consider to be a sanitised version of my parents’ and older siblings’ arrival in Australia from Holland. The sort of story you might read in history books. In it, he describes my father as a man I do not recognise, so different from the father I knew.

Even in the same family, parents behave differently with each child. Thus, each child has a different experience of parenting, even when they share the same biological parents and are raised by these parents. When we nine children who span nearly twenty years were young, we ate at the same breakfast table. We shared evening meals, watched the television together—depending on the state of my father’s sobriety. When he was on the bottle, then not one of us ventured near the television room where he sat alone. But when he was sober, which happened more towards the beginning of each week, we watched television together.

Twenty-five years ago, when I began to take my family experience more seriously than my earlier years allowed, I wrote letters to my various siblings scattered throughout Australia and asked whether we might cooperate in the writing of a book. I had in mind that each one of us could contribute a chapter on what it was like to live within the same troubled family. I kept a series of files on each of my siblings, including one for me, in which I held our correspondence. I have it still.

The project fell over. I did not have the determination needed to compete with the few of my siblings, brothers mainly, who believed they should oversee such an enterprise.

So now I write my own story, knowing that others in my family shared those grim nights, crouched on the bed with my mother, praying the rosary while my father stormed through the house, visiting us repeatedly and threatening to hurt our mother, or any of us who challenged him.

One night, one of my brothers swore at our father, who then lurched towards him ready to punch; my brother leaped out the window. It was late at night when he returned with two policemen in tow. They had picked my brother up on the streets of Canterbury and interrogated my mother and my father as to the circumstances of this ten-year-old boy out alone. In the end they described the situation as a ‘domestic’, one they could not respond to unless our father hit our mother or one of us children and we had the bruises to prove it. All of these factors reflect tensions in our understanding of what constitutes sexual abuse and violence. It can be difficult to settle on any certainty about this, other than our increased understanding that too early an introduction to adult sexuality for children and unwanted sexual advances among adults are abusive. And a clear suggestion, we need to respect one another’s body boundaries better.

The boundary between disgust and pleasure, between varying social pressures as to what’s okay and what not, the nature of pornography as distinct from erotica, the imposition of sexual ideas on children exposed to too much too soon, all of these factors reflect tensions in our understanding of what constitutes sexual abuse and violence. It can be difficult to settle on any certainty about this other than our increased understanding that too early an introduction to adult sexuality for children and unwanted sexual advances among adults are abusive. And a clear suggestion, we need to respect one another’s body boundaries better.

My story is one of many stories shared by women who find themselves demeaned by the desires of men to fit into their fantasies as sexual objects even in childhood, well before we are ready for such encounters. Such versions of sexuality are not about loving attempts at connection and pleasure, but far more to do with power and what the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips calls the desire to feel big by making others feel small. The actions of a bully or an oppressor. They can’t be good for anyone.

The only way out is to speak out. The only way we can step out of being victimhood is by protesting.  #MeToo is one such channel for our voices. For many women’s voices, women and girls, to call out together, to oppose the treatment we received; to shame those who have shamed us into a recognition that this way of relating is not good for any of us.

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Elisabeth Hanscombe is an Australian born psychologist and writer who completed her doctorate in 2012 on the topic ‘Life writing and the desire for revenge’. She has published several short stories and essays in the areas of autobiography, psychoanalysis, testimony, trauma and creative non-fiction in anthologies, psychotherapy journals and magazines, including Brevity Blog. Her childhood memoir, The Art of Disappearing was published in 2017. She blogs at http://www.sixthinline.com