Trigger Warning

Continuing from my previous post (1 of 4) of the same title . . . :

But why, more specifically, do I believe there is a substantial possibility that my sister was sexually abused by our father?

It comes down to a combination of a small but, taken together, significant—to me anyway—handful of items:

(1)
I was sexually abused by our father, so I know through firsthand experience that our father was capable of sexually abusing his own children.

(2)
Another close relative of my generation told me of their experience of being sexually abused by our father when that relative was a child, so I know that I was not the only child of my generation among our father’s blood relations whom our father sexually abused.

(3)
In the summer of 1980—the summer, ironically, before I entered Vanderbilt Law School—I broke into our father’s then residence on Hampton Avenue in Nashville, Tennessee, where we once lived as a family and where our father was, at that time, living alone. My conscious motive, on that day, for breaking in started with the view I had through the front door’s sidelight windows of the floors of the front hallway and and dining room, which were carpeted with stacks of old newspapers alternating with clusters of empty wine bottles, through which a few newspaper-, bottle-free paths, for getting, apparently, from room to room, wended their narrow ways—my motive, on a conscious level anyway, arising from shock at the depths to which our father’s life had, based on what I saw through the sidelight windows, apparently sunk, and from a desire for further verification by undertaking an inspection of the entire house—something only breaking in, I reasoned at the time, would enable me to carry out, as I had no key and felt sure our father, who was away from the house at the time of my break-in, would never willingly permit such an inspection . . . I may go into the complete details of my memory of that day in a future, separate post [2015-10-26 note: and nearly all or all of these details are contained Through the Valley of the Shadow Life, a novella I’m planning to publish sometime between the end of 2015 and early March of 2016].  Suffice it to say, for current purposes, that in the summer of 1980 I broke into our father’s residence and, wending my way down various newspaper- and bottle-bordered paths—for other of the first-floor rooms as well were covered in like manner with newspapers and wine bottles—came upon, in the first-floor bedroom that had once been my sister’s (which wasn’t thus covered), an eight-millimeter projector and a number of eight-millimeter films, all with packaging displaying images of prepubescent girls with makeup on their faces, wearing only underwear or nude; packaging whose titles and descriptions, together with the images, left no doubt of the films’ content: child pornography . . .

. . .  of prepubescent girls is the salient point for purposes of this post. (That all of this was located in my sister’s former bedroom could well have been without significance, in and of itself, given that room’s location just down the hall from our father’s own bedroom, which would have made that room the most convenient in the house, from our father’s standpoint, for dedicated use as a child porn viewing venue.)

And I’m aware of the notion, which I believe may be backed to at least some degree by research, that some significant number of minor-attracted adults who possess or view child porn may possess no intention—or even desire—to behave in a sexual manner with actual children and may never undertake to engage in any such behavior. Our father, however, was, most decidedly, not such a non-offending minor-attracted adult.

More to follow in upcoming posts.

(Note:
The entire contents of this post and the previous and upcoming connected posts – outside of a few for the most part minor changes and additions – can be found in a single very long post I posted on July 19th of this year [2014]. I’m re-posting that longer post’s contents again, as a 4-post series, to make them more easily digestible, and also since, now that I’ve started using Twitter and can post tweets linked to this blog’s posts, the contents of that longer post are among the most important of this blog’s posts to me personally and, I believe, the most potentially useful to others. If you want to read everything at once and together, click/tap here to view the July 19th post.)