The ongoing trauma of carrying the wound of childhood abuse

I was five years old when I was first raped. 

That sentence silences a room. People shift uncomfortably. They don’t know where to look or how to respond. Suddenly the hum of an electric light seems very loud.

My story is not unique. It is not rare. It is not an exception. That is why I am telling it. We have to reckon with the quiet ruin that results from this kind of abuse. 

The violence I suffered as a child did not end when the rapes stopped. Abuse does not work that way. Trauma stays. It settles into your bones, into your spirit. It becomes part of who you are, how you live, breathe, eat, and move through the world.

You gaslight yourself. You shrink yourself. You never feel that you are enough. You accept mistreatment in spaces where you should be received with respect and care. You never quite shake the shame, the sense that you did something to make this happen. When you do recognise that you are being mistreated you think that you need to work harder, surrender more of yourself, be better, be beyond reproach.

Our bodies carry our abuse through the years. It gnaws at our health. The pills and operations sometimes help but the diagnoses follow each other over decades. We also suffer from the things we do to ourselves. 

I could not shake the shame. I kept my silence.

I punished myself. I became bulimic. I tried to disappear. 

I sought perfection, believing that if I was flawless I could be safe. 

I was fortunate to have an immensely supportive family. I was fortunate to live a relatively privileged life, spared from the relentless struggles that so many women face every day. I did not have to endure hunger alongside trauma. I did not have to fight for basic survival while carrying the weight of my abuse. My parents could afford therapy.

I found things that I loved, like reading, dancing, cooking and teaching. I found work, first as a teacher in a university and then, later, in a trade union, from which I derived a deep sense of meaning. I married a good man and had a beautiful child.

These milestones feel like victories, but you don’t leave the abuse behind as you move forward. You move with it. You carry it through each victory.

There was a time when I thought that I always had to live with the past in the present. It took many years to realise that I am not only living with the effects of the violence and shame of the past, but that abuse itself continues into the present.

I should have known this. I am a feminist intellectual. I have read the research that shows that people who suffered sexual abuse in childhood are at a heightened risk of revictimisation in later life. About half of all people who were sexually abused as children endure more sexual abuse as adults. The risk of further abuse is not limited to sexual abuse or other forms of abuse in intimate relationships. 

Many of us unconsciously accept various forms of abuse in other spheres of life, including the workplace. The increased vulnerability often stems from disrupted development of healthy boundaries and coping mechanisms, leaving us more susceptible to exploitation and mistreatment.

I now see this pattern clearly in my own life. The sexual abuse I experienced as a child shaped the way I have inhabited the world, even in some professional spaces. There were times when, instead of recognising unfair treatment and standing up for my own rights, I learned to normalise mistreatment, internalising the idea that my value as a person was conditional. I thought that working ever harder and better would allow me to transcend the abuse, but it was the abuse that was driving me to work harder and to accept different kinds of abuse at work. 

Like many people who have suffered abuse, I could throw myself into a struggle for others but never felt that I also had a claim to justice.

Studies have found that people who have come through childhoods on fire are more likely to suffer from severe self-doubt and feelings of powerlessness, making them prone to enduring workplace bullying, harassment and discrimination rather than challenging it. The constant fear of failure, or of being seen as “damaged”, creates a relentless drive for perfectionism. We often strive to be beyond reproach, believing that if we excel, we will be safe from scrutiny. But perfectionism does not protect. It exhausts. It makes us more vulnerable. The more we excel, the more is demanded of us, and the less we can say “no”.

You can only work harder and harder for so long. The point always comes when there is a new health crisis, a new diagnosis. 

The research also shows that people trying to outrun the fear and pain of childhood rape and others forms of abuse fear confrontation. We often freeze in high-stress situations rather than asserting ourselves, a learned survival mechanism that continues into adulthood. 

When survivors of childhood abuse enter professional spaces, we often carry an ingrained sense of obedience and hyper-vigilance, making us easy targets for workplace bullies, abusive managers and toxic work environments. We suffer far higher rates of workplace harassment, exploitative conditions and chronic stress-related health issues in adulthood. For poor and working-class women, this reality is even harsher — trapped in low-wage and often precarious jobs, with limited access to legal recourse and a greater vulnerability to retaliation, they are often forced to endure abuse in silence. To speak up can be to risk unemployment, financial ruin or further exploitation. In a system where power is already stacked against them, their survival often depends on enduring what should never have to be endured.

It is, I finally realised, the silencing of the self that enables cycles of exploitation, cycles of new abuse, to persist. To accept this is not to blame the self once again. It is to recognise that the abuse will not stop until the silencing of the self stops.

This is difficult though. A sudden moment of realisation may be a starting point, but it is only that. Learning to establish boundaries, to challenge unfair treatment and to believe in our own worth are acts of resistance, acts that affirm ourselves as people of worth. They are not always easy.

But each act of resistance takes us forward and makes the next a little easier. Finding solidarity with others who suffered in similar ways, and with people who see clearly and hold to principle, really helps. 

Community matters far more than the self-improvement culture that, rooted in a sense of personal lack, always demands more supplements, a more rigorous diet, more therapy, more meditation and, ultimately, more punishing of the self. Love — love with a romantic partner, with a family, with friends — is a healing balm. Solidarity, empathetic and practical rather than performative, brings the same balm to the wound.

Healing is often spoken about as an endpoint, a place you arrive at after enough therapy, enough resilience, enough effort. But liberation is not a single moment. It is a process. It is a struggle. It is ongoing. Behind every moment of progress there are years of accumulated pain. 

As a society, and as individual people, we must step out of the silence. We must do it together. Those of us who can speak must do so when we are ready. It is not enough for one of us to be supported and given the room to heal when so much trauma remains unrecognised, unspoken and embedded in the very fabric of society. It is not always easy, and there can be a vicious backlash, but without that first step out of silence the circles of abuse will only tighten as the years pass.

Vashna Jagarnath is a curriculum developer, pan-African specialist, historian and trade union educator who works in the office of the general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa.