Dr. Asher Lipner in Child & Domestic Abuse Volume I

page 143

Importance of disclosing abuse

While there are understandable reasons for the withholding of disclosure of abuse, it usually exacerbates the difficulty of the trauma both because silence can allow the abuse to occur repeatedly, and because it does not allow for the emotional wounds to heal.  

Loneliness, abandonment and neglect are feelings that a victim of abuse often has about others in his or her environment who did not intervene to rescue them from their abuse.  Children are often more angry at the non offending parent for not protecting them then at the one who actually perpetrated the abuse.  Partially, this is because they expect more from the “healthier parent” and partially because it feels and sometimes is safer for them to focus their angry and hurt feelings at the parent who is more likely to care and to react positively and not punish them.  Victims of rabbinic abuse or abuse by a teacher, often have more anger at the organization for protecting and enabling their molester and abandoning the protection of the students.

This reaction is not uncommon in other survivors of interpersonal violence as well.  An off duty policeman who was savagely assaulted by a gang on a subway and suffered permanent neurological damage, told me that in his nightmares and flashbacks the only thing he remembers seeing at the time of the attack are the twenty or so people who were watching and did not come to his assistance.  Many Holocaust survivors report feeling more distressed by the apparent lack of concern about them by the whole world than by almost any other aspect of their trauma.  This is why in clinical work it is important to view all sexual abuse as involving three parties: the abuser, the abused and the bystander.    Trauma in general has come to be viewed by psychologists as a phenomenon that cannot be fully described and understood in and of itself, but needs to be seen as an experience that takes place in a social context that both creates the environment in which it occurs as well as the environment in which the survivor continues to live. [...]