Alberto Pellai and the three life-saving rules to teach children against sexual abuse: “I say no, I run away, I run to tell someone”

Chiara, a medical student, was 28 years old when she decided to take her own life. She was still a child when she was abused by a relative, but she had never found the courage to talk about it. The parents had discovered it by chance, through the pages of a diary left open. The same people who, two years after her dramatic death, were unable to resist the uncontainable pain of the loss of that only daughter and decided to end it together last December 9th, next to each other, in their car parked outside. interior of the home garage, in Rivalta. «Chiara committed suicide because she was a victim of abuse. Now we are just shadows”, the father, one of the best-known family doctors in Orbassano, in the Turin area, had said in an interview released shortly before. A heartbreaking story that brings attention to the drama of child abuse and the psychological consequences for the victims, but also on how it can be prevented.

To address the topic is Alberto Pellaiwriter and developmental psychotherapist, who in an article published on Christian familyexplains how the first step to protect children is to talk openly with them about abuse, warning them of the possible dangers and providing them with some basic tools. «Children who are victims of sexual abuse often grow up with an experience of helplessness and guilt. Their victimization, something that grows inside them – if not addressed with adequate therapy – sometimes ends up affecting their emotional, affective, socio-relational skills”, explains Pellai who then adds: “No one, when you are a child, provides you with the primary prevention strategy necessary in these cases, based on the three skills of “I say no, I run away, I run to tell someone”. Adults don’t teach these three life-saving rules because they fear that explaining what sexual abuse is to a child will scare them or make them distrustful. towards the adults around him. Instead, simply, explaining all this to a child helps him to be competent in cases where someone makes him experience strong discomfort associated with the way he/she interacts with his/her body and sexually connotes relationships with him/her”.

In those who have suffered abuse and perhaps have never spoken about it, the traumatic memory can be reactivated after some time. In Chiara’s case it had given rise to panic attacks and pain, to the point of making it impossible for her to survive. «It is for this reason that Chiara, at the age of 28, took her own life, despite being a young woman full of dreams, desires and hopes, however killed by an uncontainable pain», explains Pellai. «Sexual abuse is a shadow on the heart. It can stay there all your life and become a burden with which, almost always in silence, you learn to live. Or, it can suddenly transform from a shadow into darkness and obscure everything, remove light and cause one to fall into an abyss of pain from which it is difficult to emerge.”

However, it is possible to find a way out of this painful spiral, and it is the psychotherapist himself who highlights this, making it clear that those who suffer need to understand that they are not to blame and that they can find the strength to look to the future without fear but with hope: «There are pains that seem insurmountable, but which can be overcome and transformed into something else. What made us suffer cannot be erased, but we can learn to leave the past in the past, preventing it from contaminating our present to the point of making us believe that we have no right to the future. This is not the case, even when pain and anguish seem to be the only company in our days. And sexual victimization can transform us into “survivors” capable of putting the pieces back in their right place on the chessboard of their existence. Because it is not the victim of sexual abuse who is on the wrong side of life, but her abuser. Unfortunately, however, no one teaches this truth to the victims».