CALIFORNIA
OC Family
BY JOELLE CASTEIX
November 28 – 2016
I am many things. I am a wife and a mother. I am a writer and an advocate. But there is one thing that shaped the adult I have become more than anything else:
I am a survivor of child sexual abuse.
A teacher at my well-known Orange County Catholic high school sexually molested me for two years when I was a young teen. He left me pregnant and with a sexually transmitted disease.
The crime was pernicious, but it was only the beginning. School administrators knew about the abuse and did nothing, even though they knew he had molested other girls.
What wounded me the most, however, wasn’t the actual abuse. It was the cover-up by school officials. It was the fact that my parents and many of my peers blamed me for what happened. The adults who were supposed to protect me instead threw me to the wolves. They protected a school instead of a child.
I left my teen years isolated, depressed, ashamed, self-destructive and hurt. Very, very hurt. I spent years wanting to die. I trusted no one, because to me, friendship meant betrayal. I didn’t know how to have a healthy romantic relationship within my peer group, because my predator had isolated me and flung me into a manipulative and abusive world.
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