Jane Epstein in August.Photo: Chloe Aftel
When Jane Epstein was 6 years old, her brother, six years her senior, began sexually abusing her.
Epstein suffered the effects of anxiety, depression, and shame for decades before she found support.
Her life growing up before the abuse began was starkly different, she says. “I was a shy, silly girl who loved dolls and riding bikes,” she recalls. Her father, who has since died, was a school psychologist, her mother was a teacher and her brother played sports. The whole family was involved in 4H. “I was raised in a religious home. We were taught right from wrong,” she says. “[But] sex education in the ’70s was not really high on the list, nor was body safety.” They were, she says, a typical family. “This could happen to anybody’s family. No one is immune,” says Epstein.
For years, she didn’t know what to think about what happened with her brother. “My sibling never threatened me. My sibling didn’t really physically hurt me. But there was something inside of me that knew something wasn’t right,” she says. At the time, however, “I thought it was just two kids being curious.”
The trauma began to surface later. “Around sixth grade I was very angry. I was rebellious. And looking back now I can see that was the shame making me angry,” she says. “And I’ve realized how promiscuous I was, and how important boys and boys' attention was to me.”
Jane Epstein in 1975, around the time when the abuse began.Courtesy Jane Epstein
When Epstein was 21, her brother apologized, and she later wrote him a letter of forgiveness. “I believe him when he said he didn’t think he was hurting me,” she says. “I think if he had known the damage that he was causing to me and potentially himself, he wouldn’t have done it.” She did ask him, “‘Why did this happen?’ I wanted to hear that he had been sexually abused and that’s why he was acting out because that would make rational sense to me. I didn’t wish that on him, but I thought that would make sense. Why else would this happen?”
Epstein didn’t realize how profoundly she had been affected until six years ago when the abuse came up during a counseling session. Epstein was a stay-at-home mom of two boys and loved her husband. But she was unhappy and didn’t know why. She was living with a dread that she couldn’t explain and a depression so crippling that she sometimes felt like she wanted to die. “I admitted what had happened and asked the therapist, ‘It’s not really a big deal, is it? It was just two kids.’ He said it was a big deal.”
Today, Epstein says she has a “good relationship” with her brother. (Experts have found that, with proper treatment, the overwhelming majority of children who sexually abuse their siblings will not go on to repeat the abuse. “Kids who complete a specialized program have a 95 to 98 percent success rate of not reoffending,” says Watts.) And, Epstein says, her sibling supports her activism. “He understands why I’m doing what I’m doing,” she says. “He understands that it’s an epidemic.”
Epstein’s mission is to raise awareness, so both current victims and survivors know it’s not just them, and they don’t have to live alone with their trauma as she did for so many years.
“I hear from survivors time and again. They no longer feel they are being silenced and ignored. They matter. Every single one of them,” says Epstein. “I cannot fix the past, but I firmly believe that with education, we can change the future.”
For more information on how to recognize Sibling Sexual Abuse, and for ways to find support if your family is affected, go to:Sibling Sexual Trauma.com
source: people.com
