In the business world when leaders are struggling with how to motivate or guide their staff, one of the major hurtles that comes up over and over again is trust. Without trust, people will never follow you. You need to develop trust, which can take years, and one false step can destroy everything you have worked towards.

Trust issues start in our homes, in our families. We are broken people, and we mess each other up with our brokenness. Whether it is living with a bipolar mom who is as changeable as the wind, a drunken father who takes his failures out on his wife and kids, the father who has never been loved so he doesn’t know how to love, the resentful sibling that strives to destroy everyone else’s joy, or the parent who betrays their spouse and/or their children, we start learning at a young age that life is not all roses and sunshine and not to trust. Seriously, if your family is supposed to love you and you can’t trust them, who can you trust?

To show some statistics about families and abuse, following are some statistics from a report, Child Maltreatment, 2014 – 25 Years of Reporting, from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Administration for Children and Families Administration on Children, Youth and Families Children’s Bureau (1).

“The majority (78.1%) of perpetrators were a parent of their victim, 6.3 percent of perpetrators were a relative other than a parent, and 4.1 percent had a multiple relationship to either multiple victims in the same report or multiple victims across reports.

• Nearly 4 percent (3.7%) of perpetrators were an unmarried partner to the victim’s parent.
• The national estimates of children who received an investigation or alternative response increased 7.4 percent from 2010 (3,023,000) to 2014 (3,248,000).
• The number and rate of victims of maltreatment have fluctuated during the past 5 years. Comparing the national estimate of victims from 2010 (698,000) to 2014 (702,000) show an increase of less than 1 percent.
• Three-quarters (75.0%) of victims were neglected, 17.0 percent were physically abused, and 8.3 percent were sexually abused.
• For 2014, a nationally estimated 1,580 children died of abuse and neglect at a rate of 2.13 per 100,000 is children in the national population.”

These numbers are based on submitted reports. I know many women who suffered in silence and were never counted. Broken arms and death are hard to hide, but emotional and sexual abuse are a different story.

Let’s look at the long list of issues within a family from another angle. All of the issues cause pain and shame. So, what do we do? We hide them! “No one can know or they may discover that my life is really messed up.” But remember, we are not alone. It isn’t just us. There is help out there; but if we are always hiding, we cannot get help. We have lived too long in a world that tells us to just suck it up and keep going. Instead, we should say this is messed up, let’s fix it so our kids don’t have to live like this.

My family yelled, “don’t tell anyone!” Nothing was discussed. I was left alone in my nightmare, and no one knows the extent of the damage. They don’t want to know. It is painful. It is stressful. It is ugly and nasty. True. But ignoring it won’t make it go away. It will only keep growing. I hope that thought makes you want to vomit. I understand that this is uncomfortable. My stomach is churning just writing this. But we can not keep ignoring that there is a serious problem. There is a hard truth that must be acknowledged. Consider, for a moment, a six year old child who is raped. The perpetrator experiences several moments of pleasure. The child will be scarred for the rest of their life. If we hide the negative consequences to the child, the perpetrator can easily convince themselves that the child enjoyed it too. We have to kill this lie. In my instance, I was told that “Everyone is doing it; they just don’t talk about. It is fine.” It is not fine. The effects are devastating for the child and impact all future life relationships and experiences.

References
1. Child Maltreatment, 2014, https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/cb/cm2014.pdf