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What if I was abused by more than one person--I must have done something to deserve that?
"The answer is still no. Your suffering may have been greater than someone who was abused by one person and you may have greater problems trusting people, but you did not do anything to deserve it.
Unfortunately the tendency of victims to place the blame on themselves increases when more than one person has abused them. When victims of multiple abuse try to understand why it happened to them, they have a harder time understanding that several people were sick rather than just one. It is easier to believe that if all of these people are abusing you, it must be because you are bad or are doing something to deserve it. And a child who is abused by several people is more likely to believe that the abuse is a punishment, even when that child becomes an adult.
A child sees himself/herself as the center of the universe. If most of the people he/she knows in his/her world hurt him/her, he/she concludes that he/she must somehow deserve it. He/she does not know that there is a larger, saner world outside. He/she only knows what he/she experiences and he/she learns to hate himself/herself and to distrust others.
I want to make it clear that the responsibility for the abuse is on the adult, not the child. The adult knows what is right and what is wrong and should have the control necessary to avoid abuse no matter what the child does. Whatever the number of people who abused you as a child, you are in situations from which you could not escape. When you cannot control a situation, you are not
responsible for it. No matter how much abuse you suffered as a child, or how many people were part of it, you did not cause it to happen and you are not to blame."
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