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If the person who abused you was not a close family member, you may find it easier to enter the confrontation purely for yourself,

not longing for reconciliation. Your family may find it less threaten-ing to be supportive as well. Obviously it will be easier for a mother to hear that a neighbor or a teacher abused her daughter, than it will be to hear that her husband, father, or son did the abusing.

But whatever your situation, it is important not to minimize the effects the process can have on you. One woman, who’d been abused by her teacher, found herself shaking and unable to sleep all night just from looking up the man’s name in the phone book and finding him listed. Breaking the taboo of silence is never something to take light-ly. It can shake your whole world.

Although it is impossible to predict the response you will get, the odds are that it won’t be satisfying, compassionate, or responsible. If it is, that’s terrific. But it can’t be counted on. Instead you must say what you have to say for yourself and assess how you feel about the confrontation in terms of what you did, not the reaction you get.

It is important that you prepare yourself for defensive and aggres-sive reactions. As a child you were violated without any adequate way to shield yourself. Now you do not have to be so vulnerable.

There are many ways to protect yourself. You may want to talk to family members individually rather than all together. You also may want to talk to some family members and not others. You may want

to begin with one person at a time, starting with those most likely to be allies. Respect your own inner timing.

However, once you begin to tell, you have set the ball rolling.

Although you may tell someone and ask them not to tell others, they may not honor your wishes or follow your guidelines. In dealing with families in which there has not been adequate respect, don’t underes-timate the betrayal you may experience.

Usually it’s a good idea to work through some of your own feel-ings before you talk with family members who may not be sympa-thetic. If you’re still doubting that it could have happened, unsure that it was really all that bad, still believe it was your fault, then it’s not the best time to try to deal with people who are likely to challenge or attack you.

If your memories of the abuse are still fuzzy, it is important to re-alize that you may be grilled for details. Laura received a letter from one of her relatives, full of demands for proof:

Rape and incest are among the most heinous of all crimes and he does not become guilty on the basis of 25-year-old flashbacks. . . . These are very serious charges and you had better present some factual evidence to back it up.

Of course such demands for proof are unreasonable. You are not responsible for proving that you were abused. However, you need to assess whether you feel solid enough to withstand such attacks. It helps if you seek out people who can support you rather than under-mine you at this stage. In this way you build your own foundation first.

In preparing for a confrontation or disclosure, it’s important to remember that, except for the protection of children, confrontations are for you. Take the time to prepare. The terms are yours: you set the boundaries, you pick the timing, you choose the turf.

After a long silence, Louise made contact with her father. She confronted him about his abuse, and they began a painful correspond-ence. After a year or so, it became clear that he was not able to com-municate through letters, that if Louise wanted a satisfying confronta-tion, she’d have to do it in person.

When Louise told her husband about this, he suggested she talk to her father with a mediator or a therapist present. Louise responded,

“But I don’t know if there’s anybody down there who could do that.”

Her husband almost hit the roof. “Down there?” he exclaimed.

“You’d actually think of going down there? Why would you leave your whole support system behind and go there? Let him come here.”

“Oh,” Louise replied. “I didn’t think of that.”

Like Louise, many survivors have trouble figuring out how to take care of themselves. But when you’re considering a confrontation, it’s essential to put your own needs first. Where and when the con-frontation takes place is of primary importance.

Preparation for an actual confrontation can be as important as the event itself. You can role-play possible scenarios in therapy or with supportive friends. Practice saying the things you want to say and re-sponding to different reactions. You can write out the things you want to get across and memorize the essential points. That way, if you get nervous, you’ll be able to remember what you wanted to say.

Talk about what it is that you want. What do you want to say?

What do you want to achieve? Assess what is definitely possible (I want to tell my mother that my father raped me), what is unpredicta-ble (I want her to listen to me; I want her to care about my feelings), and what is probably fantasy (I want to feel totally taken care of by her; I want her to divorce him; I want her to support me in suing for damages.)

Look at several possible outcomes, some of them unsupportive or hostile. Imagine the worst reaction you could get. Can you live with that?

When one woman was preparing to tell her mother that her father had abused her, she was afraid her mother wouldn’t be able to handle it:

I knew she wouldn’t attack me or reject me, but I was afraid she’d stop eating and sleeping, get sick, have a heart attack, and die. My therapist asked me to consider whether I could live with that, her death. That was a difficult session, but what I came to was that I would not have been the cause of my mother’s death. That if she got sick and died, that would be her choice. There were many other ways that she could respond to the information that I’d been abused, and if she chose death that was beyond my responsibility. I would be deeply distressed, of course; it would be hard to keep from shouldering the blame. I would feel terrible not to have her alive, but I would not die myself. I would recover. That would be my choice.

As it turned out, this woman’s mother did not get sick or die. But in order for the daughter to speak her truth, she needed to confront the worst and know she could handle it.

Dealing with abusers or close family friends can flip you into childhood insecurities. You can begin to doubt your own reality.

Therefore it is important that you provide yourself with ample support

when you approach abusers or family members. You need people who can offer a contemporary mirror, who can remind you of who you are now and affirm that your reality makes sense.

Another practical aid in staying centered is to keep a record of your interactions. If you write letters, keep copies; record phone call or make notes after the conversations: during visits, keep a daily log.

If you’re going for a visit, bring things with you that remind you of your current life: photographs, your pillow, a favorite memento or a present given to you by a friend. You can also call home for reality checks while you’re away. Or better yet, take a friend with you as a witness. Be careful about whom you pick to do this. Choose someone who won’t get drawn in by your family. (Another family member is usually not the best choice.) Be clear with that person about your ex-pectations. Make sure they can come through for you.

In confrontations, say what you want to say and ask for what you want. You may not get it, but you can at least have the satisfaction of knowing that you spoke up for yourself. If there are things you want, say so. You may want an apology, an acknowledgment of responsibil-ity, an admission that what you say is true, an expression of willing-ness to make reparations or payment, or a change in your present rela-tionship (such as, don’t hug or kiss me anymore.) You may want the abuser to read certain books about sexual abuse or to go into therapy.

Chances are the abuser will not make major psychological changes as the result of a confrontation, so it’s usually more effective to ask for specific behaviors rather than changes in attitude. And it’s easier to see whether you’re getting what you’ve asked for if you’ve been con-crete.

There are many ways to confront or disclose. You can do it in person, over the phone, through a letter, in a telegram, or through an emissary. Twenty years ago, a woman went to her grandfather’s fu-neral and told each person at the grave site what he had done to her.

In Santa Cruz, California, volunteers from Women Against Rape go with rape survivors to confront the rapist in his workplace. There they are, ten or twenty women surrounding a man, giving tangible support to the survivor, as she names what he has done to her. This makes for a dramatic and effective confrontation.

One survivor told us the story of a woman who exposed her brother on his wedding day. She wrote down exactly what he’d done to her and made copies. Standing in the receiving line, she handed everyone a sealed envelope, saying, “These are some of my feelings about the wedding. Please read it when you get home.”

The initial confrontation is not the time to discuss the issues, to listen to your abuser’s side of the story, or to wait around to deal with everyone’s reactions. Go in. say what you need to say, and get out.

Make it quick. If you want to have a dialogue, do it another time.

You may fear that your abuser will further hurt you if you speak out or confront him. One woman was sure her father would appear on her front steps and try to kill her. In actuality, he hid from her after that, avoiding her totally. He was scared of her. You may not realize it, but you hold a lot of power when you choose to disclose and con-front.

Of course there are some instances where there is danger. In those cases it is essential that you take measures for your safety. You need to set up adequate protection for yourself so that the confrontation does not lead to further assault. For example, you may want to meet only in a public place, not give out your present address or phone number, or have witnesses along. You may even choose not to con-front at all because the person is too violent or unpredictable.

The aftermath of a confrontation can feel horrible, great, or any-thing in between. Women often fear that a disclosure will cause a cat-aclysm: their mother will go insane, their father will kill himself, their aunt will divorce their uncle, the principal will fire the teacher. In fact, what may happen is very little. Whole families or systems may pretend nothing was ever said. You expected an earthquake and got a shiver.

Or you may get a sympathetic response initially, and then, when the implications sink in, all support may be withdrawn. You may get a negative initial response, but as time goes on, your family may come to terms with what you are telling them and become more sup-portive. Sometimes one family member will support you and another will reject you. Alicia wrote to her parents and told them her uncle had abused her:

My mother wrote me back, accusing me of being spite-ful. It was a handwritten letter, and she must have used the word “abuse” twelve times in two pages. It was over and over again, how I was abusing her. It was clear that she wanted to be the abused child in this interaction.

My father, on the other hand, was wonderful. And this was his brother we were talking about. When he first got my letter, he sent me a note. He said, “I don’t feel defensive for Steve. What I feel is for the little girl, and I just want to pat her on the head and say, ‘There, there.’ It was just the perfect response. There was no question at all that he believed me. I know I was really lucky.

I went to visit them a couple of months after I sent the letter. He and I were alone in the car together, and at one point he said, “Can I ask you something about the incest?”

And I said, “Yeah.” I expected him to ask me factual things.

All he wanted to know was, “Are you going to be okay?

Is there an end point in sight?”

It was so moving. He didn’t care about his brother. He didn’t say, “Are you sure?” He just wanted to know I was go-ing to be okay, and then he wanted to know how he could help. He offered to help me pin down factual stuff. He said he’d find out when my uncle was and wasn’t in the country, to help me get external timetables. My dad actually sat down and helped me figure out how and when it could have hap-pened.

All he said to me about my mother was, “We feel very differently about this. Don’t assume we have the same reac-tion.”

(For more of Alicia’s story, see here.)

Confrontations and disclosures can be difficult, frightening, pain-ful, and demanding. Yet they are also opportunities to express your feelings directly, to break the twisted pact of secrecy, to assert your own needs and boundaries, to overcome your fears, and to act for yourself. All these are potent steps in working through the victimiza-tion of abuse.

Whatever the consequences, it’s common to feel some sense of relief mixed in with your other emotions. There is no longer a secret in the air. There is no longer hiding. If you don’t want to trim the Christmas tree, share Chinese New Year, or attend a cousin’s wed-ding because you don’t want to be near the abuser, you don’t have to lie about it.

After the confrontation or disclosure, you will need to decide what kind of contact, if any, you want to continue, either with the abuser or with others. You may choose never to see your abuser again. You might want to try to rebuild shattered relationships. (See

“Families of Origin”, for more suggestions.)

Many women were molested by abusers who work professionally with children—teachers and counselors. A growing number of these survivors have confronted their abusers and alerted the schools or in-stitutions where the abuse took place, in order to protect other chil-dren.

Whether the abuser is a person who works with children, a neigh-bor with access to children, or a family member, protecting children in the present and future is an important consideration. Child sexual abuse thrives in a climate where people let the past be past and hope for the best. As adults we all have a responsibility to children—to confront abusers, to warn parents of children the abuser has access to, to alert supervisors in camps and schools, to let children know that we will listen if they need to talk.

Sometimes it is difficult to weigh your own needs to be silent or to go at a slower pace against the pressing need to protect children presently at risk. Just as you are opening up to your own pain, feeling

overwhelmed with your own experience, you remember a niece or a grandson.

I’d had no contact with my father for fifteen years when my sister called up, finally furious about what he’d done to her. He’d molested both of us since early childhood, and she’d been forgiving ever since. In the course of that conver-sation, she told me our half-sister was leaving her daughter with him for babysitting. We realized that he might be mo-lesting this little girl, and discussed calling our half-sister to warn her. At first my sister was worried that we’d be calling for the wrong reason—because we wanted revenge. I said,

“So what if we are vengeful? He took his revenge out on us for years. Besides, we have to protect this child.”

So we called our half-sister and told her that our father had molested us and other foster kids for years, and that we were concerned for her daughter’s safety. She took it all in very calmly and thanked us for telling her. We felt frightened and empowered at the same time. Mostly we felt we had done something for that little girl that had never been done for us—we told, we protected, we valued her safety over the se-cret.

Although it is not good to sacrifice yourself to save others, chil-dren need and deserve protection. Deciding what to do in this kind of situation requires taking into account all the factors:

• How immediate is the risk to the children?

● How much time do I need to prepare myself?

● Are there ways I can inform the children’s parents before I’m ready to confront the abuser?

● Is there a step I can take now, knowing that more is required later?

There may be more options than you think. You can call Child Protective Services and anonymously report abuse. You can talk to the child’s teachers or the family doctor. One woman thought her brother was abusing his children. She sent them child abuse preven-tion books that encouraged telling. Another woman knew that her neighbor’s children were being abused by their paternal grandfather.

Instead of talking to the father, who she knew would be defensive and possibly hostile, she chose to talk to his wife. Since she was not a blood relation, she was more receptive.

Choosing not to confront your abuser or your family is a reasona-ble option if the choice is made from strength rather than fear. Some-times women have felt pressured by other survivors who’ve done

Choosing not to confront your abuser or your family is a reasona-ble option if the choice is made from strength rather than fear. Some-times women have felt pressured by other survivors who’ve done