New home

The prospect of an old year closing and a new one beginning seems to make people think about possible change in the future, in the light of the past.
Some friends called round on Boxing Day and got talking about where they might move if they decide not to go on living where they live now, and that kind of led backwards to talking about where they lived before they decided to move to live here.
They mentioned that when they were trying to sell their house there was a murder on the picturesque green opposite, and a family who had viewed the house twice and were seriously considering buying it had changed their minds. They didn’t want to live in a neighbourhood where there had been a vile crime so close to their prospective new home. How could they ever look out on the beauty spot, the lush green with its mature trees that was such a selling point for the area, without thinking about the poor dismembered woman who had been found there?
I had been thinking recently – because Christmas is a difficult time for people who have been through difficult times in the past, and a lot of people I know have – about adults who have survived physical and sexual abuse in childhood.
It’s natural for a family to decide they don’t want to move into a house – or even a neighbourhood – where there has been a gruesome, violent crime.
When a child is abused, it’s his or her own body that is the crime scene. And the child can’t make a choice – either as a child or later in life as an adult – to live somewhere else. The crime scene is in them; it is them and it goes with them wherever they go. They have to live with the memories. The scars can heal over or get covered up – but they don’t go.
People who advise them to ‘forget all about it; it was a long time ago’ would find it hard, I don’t doubt, to live in a murder scene all their lives. They could forget for a while, then something would come up to remind them – often when they were planning some change in their life.
Maybe they would go into the room in their home where the crime had taken place and notice that the walls needed painting again, and just as they were planning a fresh new colour for the room they would remember those blood stains on those same walls – even if they didn’t actually show any more.
Child abuse is murder - the murder of a person’s childhood, which is meant to prepare and equip them for adult life.
And child abuse is always a gruesome, violent crime - especially when it’s sweetened with bribes and favours and nice ‘kind’ treatment.
In those cases, childhood ends in violent confusion between who’s bad and what’s good, who’s nice and what is so evil that people who do those terribly confusing things need to be kept away from children – the crime scene they’ve made of an area of natural beauty – for the rest of their lives.
I know many survivors of abuse to their child-body ‘home’ who have been tempted to try and do away with the scene of the crime, destroying their bodies and minds with drugs, violence, mind-numbing routines or soul-destroying relationships.
They do well to avoid suicide.
But this year I’m praying that every person in this horrible situation finds new ways to work at healing the scars, recent or old, so the crime scene can be cleared and used for something so good that the memory of what happened there before can be replaced by loads of happier experiences.
It’s nearly the start of a new year. And God is still good.