I just got off the phone from a two hour phone call from my cousin, Karlee. She is the daughter of one of my mother’s sisters, from the Collis side of the family. Karlee had phoned me, inconsolable. Today was her little brother’s funeral. His name was Nathan Schilling and he was the only son of my mother’s youngest sister. Just over a week ago, Nathan died from a drug overdose/suicide. He was 38 years old and had suffered from entrenched depression since at least his teens, commonly expressing feeling completely worthless. He was the fourth cousin on that side of the family to die from overdose/suicide, 4 out of around 23 cousins. Many more are still living with alcoholism and addiction. Others have taken charge of it.
SANDRA COLLIS
I didn’t go to the funeral. I avoid funerals where my mother might attend. I didn’t even go to my father’s funeral (he told me to stay safe and don’t return to Australia), and I loved my father. Four years in therapy for Dissociative Identity Disorder and a further 4 years in therapy for PTSD is enough for me without seeing my abuser ever again. But Nathan’s sister, Karlee, went to the funeral, as did my cousin Sandra, a brave woman only two years younger than me who made headlines in 1990 when she took her father, my mother’s brother, to court for sexually abusing her since she was eight years old. Under duress and advised by her father’s own solicitor, Galbally, she and her sister withdrew the charges in court and then found themselves sentenced for years for perjury.
Karlee’s mother told me Sandra and her sister were in jail and wanted to see me. I saw Sandra at Pentridge Prison. She asked me for the information about the police station she’d been taken to when she reported the sexual abuse when we were children. I told her, and the name of the hospital she’d been taken to for treatment. Then I contacted Derryn Hinch who had a current affairs program at the time. Next thing Sandra and her sister were released, the perjury charge quashed, they each got a massive compensation payout for the injustice, but it came on the condition that they would never be able to talk to the press about what happened. Well that gag order does not extend to me.
When Sandra was a young adult, a cousin returned to the family. His name was Mark, he had been born to my mothers older sister when she was 14 and then adopted out. Sandra told how he found his mother and asked her who his father was. He was told it was his grandfather, that he was a child of incest. Then he fitted a pipe to his car exhaust and committed suicide.
NATHAN’S STORY
At the funeral were Nathan’s two ex girlfriends, each of them the mothers of two of his children. Karlee said my mother was there too, at the funeral of her nephew who she hadn’t seen for years. After the funeral, Karlee was searching for what had derailed her brother’s life so quickly, so extremely. She was looking for the hand that had pushed his hand to kill himself and felt the key to this was that something must have happened to him before he became a junkie on embarking upon his first relationship at the age of 17. She spoke of this with Nathan’s girlfriend, asking if there was anything she knew that could shed light on this. Nathan had left behind journals but what had happened was still obscure. What Karlee learned would take her back to 1982, when Nathan was 7 years old and they were left in the care of their aunt, my mother, someone they’d still continue to be left with until Nathan was 11 years old.
Karlee called me and left me a message “Donna, please call me urgently, I need to speak to you, I just learned what happened to my brother when he was 7 years old, what your mother did to him”. When I got the message, I already knew what she would go on to tell me.
Nathan’s ex partner had told Karlee how Nathan had been troubled deeply by what had happened to him in 1982 when he was 7 years old (I had left for good by 1978). He had been left to stay with my mother. My mother was 39 years old at this time. According to what Nathan had apparently reported, my mother had him sleep in her bed, just as she had her own two boys, the first one until he was 8 years old, the second until he was 12 and just as she had my younger brother’s two children. Nathan had apparently told that whilst 7 years old and in my mother’s bed, she showed him how to perform oral sex on her and he had complied.
“Most pedophiles are not violent toward children, instead leading and enticing children to willingly perform sexual acts although some are also violent to the point of rape and murder”
from: The Encyclopedia of Child AbuseBy Robin E. Clark, Judith Freeman Clark, Christine A. Adamec
When a pedophile sexualises, leads and entices a child into sex, they leave that child to take the blame upon themselves.
Nathan’s girlfriend was quoted as writing to my cousin Karlee:
He remembered there always being family gatherings at this house, that weird stuff would be going on outside, sexual stuff, that he felt very uncomfortable. Nathan believed he was the one in the wrong for doing this to his aunt. He didn’t consider it being molested as he blamed himself for what he did. Nathan carried this with him for the rest of his life. That woman and Mel are both to blame for his death.
This tallies with other information in my paternal aunt’s signed affidavit from 1991 referring to the nature of the household from the mid 1970s onwards:
“As long as I can remember there were lots of people continually coming and going from the Williams’ house. The typical scenario was that they would invite a group of people around and start drinking on until the middle of the night. Jack would get pretty rowdy on whisky and eventually pass out and while he passed out _______ would take on one, two or three of the male suests, whatever she felt like at the time. This went on for a number of years”.
How would a Nathan as a 7 year old go back and sit among his grade 1 classmates after being used, objectified, abused like that by a 39 year old alcoholic aunty? Who could he have told? The older sister who hadn’t known and didn’t know about and couldn’t save him from the abuse? The parents who had left him in the care of the abuser he had known all his life, who drank and laughed with the abuser as family? His 12 year old cousin who had spent his own life in the same woman’s bed?
How might the abuse have sat with him later, at age 9, or age 11 as his friends began to be interested in partners, or by age 14 when this was the foundation of whether or not he’d be able to develop healthy self esteem as a teenager? Would he have felt nobody would ever understand how someone who is a mother can sexually abuse a child, especially a seven year old boy? How might this have shaped his own sexuality and ability to function in relationships? Could this have been part of how by the age of 17 upon embarking on his first relationship he began injecting, and by the age of 38 was so far off the rails from addiction and life long depression and self loathing that he ended his own life? A narcissistic psychopath pedophile would not have given such things a moment’s thought.
Nathan was not the only child taken into my mother’s bed. There have been other children who also shared it with her. What might be their legacy? And if they have children, if the Collis Secret is not let out, what might become of their children? The buck stops here. The secrecy stops and blame the victim tactics of of inter-generational incest stops here.
Child Abuse Negl. 1983;7(2):225-37.
Confronting the incest secret long after the fact: a family study of multiple victimization with strategies for intervention.
MacFarlane K, Korbin J.
Abstract
All eleven adult females in one generation of an extended family had experienced childhood sexual abuse by either a father/uncle or an older cousin/brother. The sexual abuse had been a closely guarded secret of each victim for up to 20 years despite the fact that all of the women had close and frequent involvement in one another’s lives. Protection of the young daughter of the cousin/brother provided the impetus for disclosure and a focal point of concern for the adult women whose sexual abuse had been initiated at approximately the same age as the girl. This family’s case history is used as a vehicle to discuss intervention strategies for dealing with incest long after the fact with extended family networks.
PMID:
6685561
[PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Can J Psychiatry. 1982 Apr;27(3):231-5.
Inter-generational transmission of incest.
Cooper I, Cormier BM.
Abstract
The majority of reported incest cases involve sexual relations between one generation and another, the most common being father-daughter incest. The increased availability of clinical data on incest has revealed an aspect of the problem that has received little attention in clinical literature. Incest can involve three generations in a family rather than two. It is possible for incest to be “transmitted” from one generation to the next through several patterns. In some cases, the mother in a family of father-daughter incest has herself been a victim of incest with her own father. With a history of unresolved incest with their own fathers, these women are unable to prevent an incest relationship between their husbands and daughters. Another pattern involves situations where the father in the father-daughter incest relationship has been the victim of father-son incest in his youth. The psychodynamics of these patterns of intergenerational transmission of incest are described, with clinical examples from the authors’ work, as well as from the literature.
PMID:
7093878
[PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
MY OWN EXPERIENCES:
I have written about my own experiences of abuse. When my first book, Nobody Nowhere was published in 1991, my paternal aunt, Ronda Keene wrote a sworn affidavit regarding the abuse mentioned in the book. Ronda was brave and afraid in making that affidavit and I chose to protect her all these years. She died in 2013 and I no longer have to protect her from possible retribution. Ronda did not witness the sexual abuse but her courage in finally making a written statement of some of the physical and emotional abuse of me at only two years old gives a sense of the character of my abuser.
_______ stuffed a dish cloth rag into Donna’s mouth which caused her to vomit. The incident occurred one Christmas at my mother’s home, in Nhill. Donna vomited through her nose. The other incident was when she was slapped with the jug cord at the Preston house. Donna had been given cold spaghetti to eat straight out of the tin. _______ said “if you don’t eat this fucking stuff I am going to kill you” and then went across the room, picked up the jug cord, doubled it, returned to Donna and beat her across the face with it. _______ hit Donna a lot of times and probably would have gone on hitting her if I hadn’t been there. I went across the room and pushed _______ away from Donna and grabbed the jug cord off her. Donna didn’t cry as a result of all of that. That she didn’t cry amazed me.
It was easier for me to disclose about the physical and mental and emotional abuse, perhaps because I knew enough people had witnessed it. But for a long time I remembered the sexual abuse from men, abuse at age 12, age 9, at age 8. I also remembered fragments of abuse that happened to me at age 4 and back to age 2, which seemed to flag my mothers neglect at best, her direct endangerment if not the facilitation of that at worst. I wrote about the GPs records of seeing me at age 2 and a half for having been harmed ‘down below’. I remembered being tied to the bed in my bedroom around age 2-3. I remembered being beaten in that room until I couldn’t breathe as I ran frantic and terrified around the room from my abuser.
I wrote of being suffocated and choked in the night with a pillow over my face and taking to sleeping down the side of the bed then under the bed when I was just two years old. I remembered being hurt when I was three and finding it painful to walk. I remember being on my bed with its lemon colored embroidered flowers as my mother ‘examined’ me with palpable aura of disgust that I remember taking on about myself. But I then thought this must have been part of why I got taken to the GP, that she must have been examining the abuse I’d endured. It was too impossible to imagine that she’d actually caused it. Even though the only abuser I ever remember in my bedroom in my first seven years in my bedroom at the first house was my mother, still, I always presumed that the sexual abuse must have been a man.
And the abuser I remember from age 4 was a man, in another house. I remember being tied to a bed in a double bedroom there, so I never linked that with my mother, until finally I began having PTSD nightmares and now I heard the woman’s voice there, from the doorway and I knew that voice, my body absolutely knew that voice. It was a voice I knew very well. My mind had held on to the name of the house owner, but I could never work out who this was, until one day it twigged. I knew where this house was in relation to my mother’s mother’s house. It was by the oval, a block from her mother’s house. I could remember being in the car, the drive from her mother’s house, seeing the oval opposite the house.
I went to Google Maps, went to the satellite images, put in the address of my mother’s mother’s commission house address back then. Then I zoomed out to find the oval. There it was. I used the Google Maps tool to ‘go down the street’ and suddenly I began shaking. I had found the house. I remembered being on the drive, on a tricycle belonging to one of the owner’s children. The woman had been my mother’s best friend during her teens, part of a group. I raced across town in the car, phoned my counselor saying, “I found it, I found the house”. I got there, knew it on sight. There was a for sold sign out the front. The owner had recently moved.
I remembered the black and white ‘cone style’ vinyl wicker chair in the living room (we either eventually inherited this one or got one ourselves as we also ended up with one on our front porch when I was around 4-5. I remembered the smell of drying washing within the house and clothes strewn around. I remembered the house owner well, her voice, her eyes, her hair, her movements. Then I remembered the same woman later, when I was older. But remembering when I was abused in the room in this house I did not remember the owners voice, only what I seemed undoubtedly my mothers. I stood on the lawn taking back the power from the abusers who had harmed me here.
The neighbor from next door asked if I was ok. “Something happened to me here”, I said. She told me she was not at all surprised. She told me that the woman who lived there had come from the Kensington commission flats, from a known ‘problem family’ of offenders (same reputation as my mother’s family), how the woman’s brother was always there and had disturbed and frightened her, how the woman herself was vicious. I remembered the woman well enough. I remembered being in her kitchen and she gave me a biscuit. I didn’t find her vicious, not to me, not directly.
And I remembered her from years later, when she reappeared into my life, this time at our second house. It was 1974. I was 11. My father was away up bush visiting his friend in Echuca. My mother threw parties whilst he was away. Unlike my father’s parties which were full on, my mother’s parties were more ‘intimate’. I remember this woman, Trisha (apparently also called ‘Pat’) arriving, her husband, a couple, and a captivating Irishman. The woman from the couple gravitated straight for me and stroked my hair, held my chin, put her face too close to mine and said ‘you don’t remember me, do you?’. I was used to being handled like an object. When I was in my 20s, I learned she had been a prostitute and had jumped to her death from the housing commission flats in Flemington. The Irishman took a special interest in me (I didn’t know what ‘grooming was’). They all got drunk, danced to music, and somewhere in there I eventually crashed out. I’m not sure if I had had alcohol. These were people who had no problem giving alcohol to a child and I was used to that. I was put on ‘nerve tablets’ when I was around 9-11 (stayed on them until age 17), and I remember being oddly calm, like a sleep walker.
The Irishman came back to a few more of these parties. My father never caught them all. Then the Irishman came around on his own. When he went to jail I was in my first year at high school. He was a heroin addict and went to jail for burglary. My mother took me to the court for the sentencing. I’d never been to a court. Then I went to Pentridge with her to visit him. We lined up to be checked on our way in to the remand section, then we went into a room with booths and he was the other side of perspex and spoke to us by a phone. My mother showed me off to him. He flirted with me as he usually did. I felt I was the lure on the hook on the end of her fishing rod. The Irishman got out of jail after 6 months. Then he hung himself at a train station in Carlton.
After visiting ‘Pat’s place’, my counselor and I discussed whether I would bring charges. I decided this would only put me through all of this again. Besides, I had been 3-4 years old. This particular abuse stopped once I was in primary school, perhaps because we were checked by the school nurse regularly. It wasn’t because I could yet tell anyone. It would be another 5 more years until I had enough functional speech to ever have a chance to tell what had happened to me.
REFLECTING ON PEDOPHILES
My mother was involuntarily sectioned as a psychiatric patient when I was three but soon managed to talk her way into being released. She was an alcoholic since the age of 14. In my view she was also personality disordered and a psychopath. When I was in late childhood, around 1973, my mother was fixated on novels about child murders and was fixated with notorious child sex killers Myra Hindley and Mary Bell and had murder magazines with their graphic headlines and their faces staring out from the covers. But surely these were just ‘interests’, ‘fascinations’?
Thirty four years later in 2007, by which time my mother was 63 years old, I heard from my younger brother’s ex and the mother of his two children. Their children would go and stay with their father who lived with my mother. She told me that her 10 year old son had told her that my mother had for the third incidence slapped his face, telling him she was going to cut off his penis and shove it down his throat (Mary Bell mutilated and killed her child victims this way). She told me at the same time that she had learned that my mother had been showing violent X rated videos to her daughter from the age of 3, which would have been around 1998. I phoned the children’s school, ensuring they had a legal obligation to report the abuse and endangerment. The school phoned my brother and his ex girlfriend who phoned me enraged that I had taken such action. Uncertain they’d be protected from continuing to be left in the care of my mother, I took advice from my counselor and then reported what I’d been told to the Department for Human Services.
I understand the sociopathy, criminality and addiction background she has come from. Still, I cannot easily fathom what happened to me. In spite of my memories, my PTSD, my DID and 8 years of therapy under two different therapists, I still don’t easily handle it. I don’t think a non-psychopath can ‘get that’. How on earth could my own mother have sexually abused me, let alone had the gall to continue the pedophilia of sexualising, desensitising, grooming, enticing, and abusing other children?
Even in the context of terms like Reward Deficiency Syndrome, bipolar, compulsive, alcoholic, Borderline, Narcissistic, psychopathic, against a background of impaired social skills, poverty, emotional neglect, attachment disorder and lack of education… no matter which way I look at this, it is still the type of thing my mind struggles to fathom… a woman…a mother… my own mother? But eventually I came to understand that 1 in 5 pedophiles are women, and most of those women are somebody’s mother.
Violence Vict. 1987 Winter;2(4):263-76.
Women who sexually abuse children.
Faller KC.
Author information
Abstract
This article describes a clinical sample of 40 women who sexually abused 63 children. Sixty percent of the female perpetrators victimized two or more children. Almost three-fourths of these women sexually maltreated children in polyincestuous family situations. More than four-fifths were mothers to at least one of their victims. The most common form of sexual activity was group sex; the next most common was fondling. The mean age of these women was a little over 26; they were poor and poorly educated. Their victims were also young, having a mean age of 6.4 years at the time the case was identified. About two-thirds of the victims were female and one-third were male. Female perpetrators evidenced marked difficulties in psychological and social functioning. About half had mental problems, both retardation and psychotic illness. More than half had chemical dependency problems, and close to three-fourths had maltreated their victims in other ways in addition to the sexual abuse.
PMID:
3154169
[PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Assuming the truth of Nathan’s account, it does not make it forgivable to say that, like my father, my mother also showed some signs of being somewhere on the autism spectrum. Nor does it make it forgivable that my mother was an alcoholic since she was 14 and later also became addicted to Valium, or that she was in turn born to an alcoholic mother and grew up with two alcoholic parents.
Nor does it make it forgivable to say that any pedophile was, in turn, from a background of incest. Only a percentage of those sexually abused go on to also sexually abuse.
It is, therefore, difficult to determine with accuracy the proportion of child sex offenders that has experienced child sexual abuse. Three key related points should be recognised about the ‘victimiser-as-victim’ hypothesis. First, child sexual abuse does not cause individuals to become perpetrators later in life. Rather, experiencing sexual abuse (and other forms of maltreatment) in childhood has been found to be correlated with the perpetration of child sexual abuse later in life (Simons 2007). That is, although these two phenomena frequently co-occur, victimisation does not cause later offending. As Simons (2007: 71) states, ‘not all victims of sexual or physical abuse become perpetrators, and not all sexual offenders have experienced abuse as children’. Indeed, research shows that the majority of victims of child sexual abuse do not become perpetrators of child sexual abuse later in life (Salter et al. 2003). From: Misperceptions about Child Sex Offenders
Pedophiles are generally adults, they have the ability to disclose their impulses, get psychiatric help, or…. kill themselves. I would rather have killed myself than ever commit upon a child the things committed on me. I would rather have seen the pedophiles kill themselves than pass on their legacy in those who have that 30% risk of then doing the same, and those who lose their lives to alcoholism, drug addiction and the suicide that takes the family secrets with them.
Presuming Nathan’s account is true, and from my own background I have no problem imagining it is, then if a pedophile abuser shows up at their victim’s suicide related funeral in my mind this is like the murderer showing up at their victim’s funeral. I’m sorry, but when it comes to understanding, the psychopathy of someone like this is simply beyond me.
Donna Williams, BA Hons, Dip Ed.
Author, artist, singer-songwriter, screenwriter.
Autism consultant and public speaker.
http://www.donnawilliams.net
I acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the Traditional Owners of this country throughout Australia, and their connection to land and community.
This item originally posted here:
The legacy of a pedophile mother – by Donna Williams