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It was a warm summer day. None of the kids were in school considering it was summer vacation. Little Tina was playing in the kids’ room with the toys. Mommy and Daddy were gone somewhere.
Little Tina didn’t really pay attention to where everyone was. She was just a little girl and wasn’t concerned about where others were or what they were doing. She was playing alone with her toys minding her own business. There were at least four little kids in the home.
Tina’s family moved in with some friends of her parents. Little Tina didn’t know them until they moved in with them. The whole family lived there including big brother Mark. There was lots of trauma there for the kids. Well a couple of them anyway.
She was playing in the kids’ room but she had to use the bathroom. She walked into the bathroom and there was her 12-year-old sister on the floor. She was crying and telling him to stop and that it hurt. Little Tina was about 7 years old. She saw the other father on top of her sister.
This 7-year old Yelled at him to get off of her sister and he tried to tell little Tina that her sister liked it and wanted it. Little Tina knew better because her sister was crying. Little Tina didn’t understand exactly what he was doing to her sister but she knew whatever it was, her sister didn’t like it and didn’t want it.
Little Tina argued with him. He threatened to do it to Tina too. Her sister began to plead for Her to leave. Tina threatened to tell her parents and her sister begged her not to tell anyone. Little Tina didn’t understand but she didn’t tell because her sister was so upset and serious about her not telling.
It was a “twofer one” trauma. One violent act created two traumas. One for each child. Little Tina was potty trained by the age of 18 months. She hadn’t wet to bed since she was two but she peed to bed that night.
Her mother was surprised and embarrassed in front of the other mother. Mommy had no explanation. Life went on as usual for little Tina and her siblings.
How does witnessing a crime affect a child?
When people think about witnessing a crime, what usually comes to mind is something that happens outside the home like a robbery or carjacking, or a drug deal that has gone wrong.
It isn’t often we think of images of a small child witnessing a crime in her own home, however, There can be any number of crimes that a child might witness.
Not all homes are safe places for children. In my home growing up, it was never safe. I never felt safe. Not only did bad things happen to me, but they happened to my siblings too. When the perpetrator is an adult in the house or more than one adult in the house, this child’s world is not a magical one.
For some children, there is no magic. There is only survival such as the way life was for me. For some children, although difficult to imagine, there is no love or protection or provisions to meet basic needs. Life becomes survival for the child and the child’s development is then damaged.
For me, my whole life has been about how I’m going to survive if this happens or that. I’m lucky I have always been a contingency planner, even as a four-year-old. Even when I played using my imagination, it was about surviving. I was usually the superhero saving people.
I never fantasized about being the victim. I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. No one has ever saved me or even helped me survive the traumas that I survived as a small child on up. I survived on my own. With the help of intermittent strangers. I never got help from family or family friends. They were the perpetrators and their protectors.
It wasn’t until I started experiencing community violence that I would survive from the help of a stranger such as the Custodian in the park that saved my life or my friend who pulled my ex off of me when he was strangling me to death.
It was a horrible message that there was not a safe place in this world and I had to survive the horrors of this world until I die. I used to pray that I will die in my sleep from natural causes. I believe this is how I will die. In my sleep of kidney failure.
A Child’s Awareness of their own mortality is unusual.
I’ve been aware of my own mortality since I was 7-years-old. I was aware that death is final and that I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to be murdered. I’m truly surprised I survived as long as I have.
Witnessing a crime happening to someone else makes a child feel helpless. It made me feel like I had to be tough to survive and I was right. Witnessing a crime has lasting effects on a child and when it’s in the home it has even more lasting effects that can add more difficulty to the developing child.
For me, I witnessed my older sibling being raped which possibly traumatized her as well as me. With this sort of violence in the home, it really makes a child’s world seem dangerous.
For me, the anxiety of everything being life or death and the nightmares, along with the ongoing sexual abuse that lasted until I moved out of the home had me so stressed, I was neurotic even as a child.
Surviving trauma isn’t the end of it, it’s just the beginning of a whole different way of living.
