Deafness and Child Sexual Abuse

PLEASE NOTE: A captioned and British Sign Language Interpretation version of this episode can be found on Youtube.

How is the experience of childhood sexual abuse different for d/Deaf people? Join Sophia (she/her) in conversation with Sabian (he/him), a deaf entrepreneur as they talk about child-on-child abuse, female abuse, and ways of listening without hearing.

Thank you to Gavin Lilley for providing the British Sign Language interpretations for this video, which you can access on Youtube, and to Hannah Daisy for recommending him.

You can follow more of Sabian's work @theuberhuman on Instagram and Tiktok.

RESOURCES MENTIONED BY SABIAN IN THIS EPISODE

Academic article about Black American Male perspectives of being abused by women.*

*Please note - in sharing resources mentioned by our co-hosts, we are not necessarily endorsing all of their content, but we do so to allow you to make up your own mind.

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:07 Diagnosis and Concentration Fatigue
• 3:00 Hearing and Deaf person's experiences of child sexual abuse
• 9:58 Women Abusers
• 14:06 Assumptions of the gender of your abuser
• 18:12 Body Language and listening
• 21:15 End

Transcript

0:04

I have to use my eyes as my ears. Hearing people don’t understand that is where deaf people’s strength lies, you understand. Because my abusers were mostly women, and I was pretty much raised by women. A deaf man has taught me to listen better and I'm very grateful for it. So thank you. Welcome to Secrets Worth Sharing, a series all about having better and more approachable conversations about child sexual abuse. This episode is specifically about deafness and CPTSD, and for that, I am joined by Sabian. Hi, I'm Sabian. I’m a deaf entrepreneur. I’m the founder of Deaf Hands. We work on creating artificial intelligence and augmented reality to help advance deaf communities in the future. As a hearing person, the two of us have very different experiences of child sexual abuse, and this episode will run with us comparing and contrasting in a lot of those ways. So it's going to be a little bit different to our usual episodes, but we hope you enjoy it. I first got my hearing aids at eleven. Up until that time I was known as what’s called hard of hearing. In the black community that means you’re stubborn, not deaf, so I had to get a lot of difficulties coming up, adjusting to my deafness, just hard of hearing. When I turned eleven mum took me to the hospital and she finally accepted that I needed a hearing aid. Up until that time I’d had so many different experiments like made, had like candle’s wax put in my ears, you know, you put the chinese candle wax, some kind, pop your ears like maybe there’s crayon stuck in his ears or something. I had to literally fully accept that I was deaf but it was hard to accept that because it didn’t feel like the people around me had accepted my deafness. So for a long time I wasn't really able to adapt or make that transition from being a boy who wasn’t wearing a hearing aid to a boy who was wearing a hearing aid. I wasn't introduced to the deaf community, I didn't learn sign language or anything like that, so I found myself pretty isolated. One of the things you've talked about before is concentration fatigue, and this I found fascinating. Alright, so concentration fatigue is a result of your brain having to focus on something for an extended period of time. If I'm out with a lot of people I have to use my eyes as my ears. I have to watch your body language, to watch your face and stuff. So you’ll probably notice I'm not looking at you all the time, I just kind of like, pick up so much when I'm watching people's faces and that. What concentration fatigue is basically the result of having to concentrate a lot harder than a hearing person would have to. One thing I'd love to chat with you about is the difference between a hearing person’s experience of child sex abuse and a deaf person's experience. And obviously we can only talk for ourselves but I think it would be a really interesting comparison. When I've heard a lot of people speak about their sexual abuse it’s obviously been a hearing person. Much of it can revolve around what they heard and what was said and all that stuff. As someone who is deaf I wondered if I ever went to the police or anything like that, they’d wanna know what was said and obviously what was done, but then how can I cooperate if I can't hear what was said to me and all that kind of thing? For me, A lot of my abuse was physical, so it was dictated, actions I needed to do, to someone, in a sense. There was physical ramifications for not doing that, if that makes sense. That was a lot of frustration because I'm not sure if like they knew I was deaf because back then I was still seen as hard of hearing, so to speak, you understand, so it’s kind of like a give and take in a way. But for me it was, all I could take from it was what that person did. They were speaking but I don’t remember what they said, you understand. I don't, have it, because I can't recall long term abuse because I couldn't hear what they were saying. So all I have is the actions of my abuser and that's always made me feel like if I were to talk about I couldn’t really prove much, I could only say what is done, but I can't say what was said in the moment, so the things that may have been clues as to this is what they were going to do. So it made me focus a lot more on body language, seeing the signs of when they were about to try and bring me along and literally avoid them. I became very avoidant, as a result of that, I was able to protect myself better. And I think that back then it was just different people and different people had different tones and different quirks or patterns. So I literally had to learn every pattern you understand. In some ways it's probably one of the reasons why I hone in on everyone that I speak to. I learned how their lips move when they said certain words, learned how their face moved when they’re talking, I learned their body language and their pattern, and I have that for, like, dozens of people in my head. I know their patterns and stuff, so if anything is out of line, I know something’s up, and I question them. The problem is that a lot of people get really annoyed when they're questioned. You’re too observant. So it's like, it's a, it's a very fine line to play because hearing people don't understand that that is where deaf people’s strength lies, you understand. In that we do pick up on what is not said rather than what is said, and I suppose my abuse kind of pushed me towards that in some ways in that I want to seek out predators, I want to seek out people who are lying, kind of thing, and then that kind of helps me in my own way, to kind of navigate the world. Sometimes I feel safest when I know I'm in danger, if that makes sense. Well, not really, but ... What do you mean, can you say? When you’ve been abused enough times, you know the patterns, you know how to pick out what is dangerous. You pick up a survival instinct. The act of... so I’m like, okay, I see a predator, but I can beat you, I can outsmart you. You know what you're getting in to. So it's almost like a way of rewriting your story in some ways, that I'm no longer a victim, I'm now in control of my destiny. A lot of my abuse happened in my family and everyone in my family is hearing. There were so many minuscule little signs like If you knew, you knew, and if you were looking for them, maybe you'd have seen. Even at the park, right, there was one time where my abuser - I saw it in a family video - he was taking everyone off a swing, and then really subtly I just took myself off the swing and ran off and no one noticed because why would you? But when I hear about your experience and just being able to, like, clock those tiny little body movements, sometimes I think, oh, I wonder if anyone would have clocked if they weren't here in person, you know. We all have intuition and we all have that especially as children. We know there’s certain adults we don’t take a liking to and all that stuff. We just, even if we don’t know, there’s something that tells us that. I feel in the hearing communities we’re not necessarily taught to tap into that, you understand, we’re taught to tap into what people say and believe what people say, take their word for it, you understand? And I found hearing people struggle with silence. They spend so long distracting themselves with sound and stuff. Put them in silence, and it's like, I don't know what to do. Even at night. I can’t do it. I put a podcast on, I can't do it. But why is it that everyone feels like that? What is your fear in silence? My thoughts. Ah, so you fear yourself? I dunno. I find at night time, yeah, I want to have one thing to focus on. And if I'm lying in bed and there's no podcast to focus on or something, I'll just be awake with my thinking. And that's at a time where I just want to, silence. Yeah. I find the thoughts that go through our mind to be the most important story of who you are. And I feel like people are afraid of their thoughts because they think that their thoughts make them who they are. All those things you just said, like ticking the box, going to uni, they’re all things I did when I was trying to block out the thoughts about my abuse as well. And one of the ways I stopped getting abused was I just used to say, oh, I'm really busy with school, I can't come and stay over at the family member's home. And I then thought, well I’ve made this lie, I might as well do the school work, and then it just went from there. I spent much of my childhood suppressing my experiences as a child - my teens should I say. I didn’t think about anything that happened from eleven, before I was eleven years old. I would only think about my life from sixteen onwards. Okay. So, when I had girlfriends, I’d only talk about from sixteen onwards, you understand. Anything before then, you’d never find out anything about it. I think it’s because I didn't know how to process it. I didn't like the feelings that came up around it, because my abusers were mostly women and I was pretty much raised by women. It was like, difficult to deal with, because on one side you know you’re raised to admire women and that stuff and then the other side was women who kind of broke your trust in some way. It’s interesting because - I think we’ve spoken about this - it kind of brought me to question, like, misogyny and how we approach misogyny in society, you know, when we call men misogynists, and that stuff. But I've always got a question, like, but if a man was actually hurt by a woman, wouldn't he have a right to be misogynist or hate women for it, you understand? Not to say that is right to do so, but if someone, you know, if a woman is hurt by a man, you know, she can say “all men are trash” or there’s, you understand, and no-one really bats an eyelid. So it's like why we're so quick to call men misogynist, but not quick to question what they may have gone through to cause them to think that way, you understand, and I feel like unless we’re able to ask those types of questions then we can't get to a point where men are able to be more open about their feelings, you understand, maybe heal from that, like it wasn't all women, it was some women, you understand. I read like a study. It was called, She Touched Me, and it was about African-American boys and the sheer number of African-American boys who had reported being abused by women in their childhood and how that data had been suppressed in favor of talking about, you know, toxic masculinity, and all these things. For me, it was difficult to become a misogynist, to be angry against women and stuff, because I had such admiration and respect for the women that I grew up. So it's like an internal conflict between me, you understand. I couldn't really allow myself. I found myself to be in a position where I want to protect women more than anything, but I was in a position where I question what those women went through, that caused them to do the same thing to me, you understand. I found out that all the women who abused me were also abused by men. Wow. When they were younger. How did you find that out? Did they tell you? Some told me. Yes. Some other people told me when I spoke about it. It’s difficult because in some ways you have your anger, but in other ways I could say that generational trauma, and stuff, is something I've always been very passionate about, understanding the intergeneration, like the generation gap between older generation and younger generation. But I'm also trying to understand generational trauma and how to break it, and if you want to break generational trauma, you have to have those tough conversations and also understand that there's something else going on that you might not know about. And unfortunately, because they weren't taught better, they did what they were taught. For someone who's abused, unfortunately, your sense of right and wrong becomes screwed. Yeah. You understand, your everything about who you are is almost rewired in some ways by that experience. Yeah. In my case it caused like hypersexuality, extreme tastes sexually, pushed more towards the BDSM side of life, you know, that side of things. I realized that it's about trying to reclaim some part of your story and who you are, in that stuff, you know, your power, in some ways. Until you accept it, you end up being ashamed of it or trying to push it away, and all that kind of things. And that's the thing, on the point of the abusers being abused, like my abuser was also abused. And whilst I empathize with that a lot because he did it to me, it doesn't make it okay that he’s done that thing. Agreed, it doesn’t, it doesn’t, yeah I understand, it’s a touchy one you understand, because on one side it's like okay I get it but then why’d you do the same thing to me if you didn't like it, then why would you do it to someone else you know? And I find it much more difficult for me, I have a lot of empathy for people, you understand, sometimes too empathetic, but underneath that I have a lot of anger and rage that I need to release, and all that stuff is one reason why I started doing like martial arts, muay thai, you know the stuff, to try and control that because I've always been afraid of letting that go, and how far I would go if I did let it go. One of the things that really struck me about your story is - my story is very common in the sense that hearing person being abused sexually by a man, whereas I think yours is like almost the opposite, right? Like a deaf person sexually abused by men and women. And I think a lot of the time that side of things really gets ignored. It's interesting because I think it might be more common than we think. Do you? Yeah. I think it might be more common than we think. Except men don’t talk about what they’ve gone through. To admit that a woman at any point of your life had power over you, it’s almost like handing in your male card. Like, yep, I’m not a man kind of thing, see what I mean. So a man can’t heal unless they deal with their demons and reveal that part. But there’s also a part of society that teaches a man we can never be overpowered by a woman. So even if it happened to you as a child, you can’t admit that, you understand, because it’s seen as taking away from who you are as a man if a woman could overpower you then you’re never gonna be a real man or you’re never gonna be seen as a real man, kind of thing. That's kind of something I battled with for a little while. It kind of manifested in the kind of relationships that I got in to in some ways. I’d be a bit more submissive to my partners in some way, and I was more about not trying to rock the boat too much. You blame yourself, you understand, so you feel like oh, I must have done something to make her do that kind of thing, you understand, and that then becomes the behavioral cycle that repeats in a relationship. It’s only recently that I kind of realized that I needed to change the dynamic for my self, to reclaim my masculinity. Sometimes I believe that if you're abused by a woman, that feminine energy might come out a bit more so because of society's expectations of man, we may present that masculine side even more, you understand, because you want to suppress that in order to be sort of bravado coming through, the ego coming through and all that stuff. Have you ever had it when you've told someone about your sexual abuse and they've assumed that it was a man? I know you've had it. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, that’s literally, it’s almost nine times out of ten, the assumption is that it’s a man. I don't believe there's any kind of real belief in society that a woman can be capable of inflicting that on a child because mothers, you understand, women are mothers, why would they do that to a child kind of thing, but kind of interesting having to shake up the paradigm and be like “what? It was a woman? Nahh,” you understand, the disbelief that follows that, in that sense. My family is very loud. I come from a loud household. Part of it is mostly me, but still, and one thing I'm realizing when I talk to you is rather than that loudness being a source of listening, it's actually a cause to like drown out the noise, drown out the bad feelings, drown out the badness and actually very rarely, like even now I've just moved with my partner to the seaside and it's just the two of us, and I'm like, I really don't like this silence. Where's the chaos? But actually it does allow you to sit and think a lot more, and as you said, learn who I am. On that, I wanted to kind of move us to some tips for people listening, right, and one thing I think that would be really interesting for you to share that intuition in body language when you can really tell if you can trust someone or what would you like other people to kind of learn from your experience of body language? Oh. Wow. That’s a loaded question. When it comes to body language, I feel like, we’re taught that communication is 85% body language. You really think about it, 10% verbal, 5% verbal language or that stuff. But that's not necessarily reflected in our culture, in a sense. I mean, people that I know I watched them. I watch how they respond to different situations. But we spend so much time talking when we’re in each other's presence, we don't have a time to watch, you understand. We spend more time listening than more time watching the people in your environment, get used to noticing their quirks and their ticks, when they’re uncomfortable, you understand. What then happens is in the silence, you know, when someone is feeling uncomfortable, you know when someone needs a hug, or you know when someone needs support, you know when someone needs distraction, you understand, because you’re in that silence with them, and so much more is communicated in the silence than it is in the hearing world or in the sound. Applying it to child sex abuse, I wonder if we then asked people to go out and just observe, just observe what's happening in family environments, how children are being interacted with. They might have picked up on those physical cues that no one else is looking out for. If you look at someone in the eyes for 5 minutes when you’re sat real close to them, you get so much from them in that moment, you understand, it’s just little things. Practice that look then with a partner and see what you pick out from each other in this time. I think that's like a good place to end it, encouraging people to really sit back, observe, look at body language, look at these moments. And you probably will be really surprised what you end up seeing. Definitely. Yeah. Well, thank you. You’re welcome. Thanks for having me. Not at all. I really hope that this conversation inspires you to start some of your own and I think from learning about Sabian, especially about body language, observing, sitting in silence and watching, you learn so much more about how to be a better listener. You know, a deaf man has taught me to listen better, and I'm very grateful for it. So thank you. And yeah. Any time. I just ask that you share this episode with one person and you will be really amazed at the sorts of conversation you might have coming out of this. Remember to observe, look at some children in your life, watch how they're interacting with others. You might pick up on something that we would have wished that someone have picked up for us many years ago. So, with that, we’ll end, we’ll say goodbye. Thank you.