Writing My Way Back...
- Chantilly Whittle
- May 9
- 12 min read
A survivor’s reflection on truth, lineage, justice, and healing
The Wellness Grove — No. 6
I can breathe now.
There are some truths the body remembers before the mouth is ready to speak them. For years, I thought survival meant moving forward. I thought if I kept building, kept mothering, kept loving, kept creating, kept putting one foot in front of the other, maybe the past would stay where I buried it. But trauma does not stay buried just because we learn how to function. Complex PTSD is just that — complex. It rewires more than memory. It reshapes the nervous system, the body’s sense of safety, the way a person loves, trusts, rests, protects, and prepares for harm. It can make peace feel foreign, and danger feel familiar. It can make the past arrive uninvited, even twenty years later.
Twenty years later, I found myself sitting with a victim impact statement, trying to put language around something that never should have happened in the first place. Trying to explain the weight of what was taken. Trying to make a system understand that abuse does not end when the act ends. It echoes.
It reshapes the nervous system.
It follows you into relationships, motherhood, grief, trust, safety, faith, anger, and silence. How do you summarise twenty years of impact?
How do you explain what it feels like to be harmed as a child by someone connected to family, blood, trust, or access? How do you describe the way incest and sexual abuse fracture a person’s understanding of safety before they are old enough to understand what safety even means?
I had to write words I never wanted to write. I had to revisit wounds I thought I had already survived. I had to face not only what happened then, but what it still costs now.
And I need people to understand this: survivors are not dramatic for still being affected. We are not weak for still remembering. We are not broken because our bodies kept score. We are living proof that harm can stretch across decades.
One of the truths that hurts the most is knowing I was not alone in the trauma connected to this man, or in the pain tied to growing up in the house he called home.
But those are not my stories to tell. I will not take ownership of anyone else’s wounds, name anyone else’s experience, or force anyone else’s healing into public view. I can only speak from the truth I carry. What I can say is that I pray every survivor connected to that pain finds the peace, safety, love, and tenderness we all deserved from the beginning.
Recently, while speaking with my estranged family, I learned pieces of history I had never been allowed to know. Estrangement was not born from a lack of love. Much of it was shaped by isolation, control, and the way abusive parents can cut a child off from the people and stories that might have helped them understand where they came from.
In those conversations, I learned that my mother’s own beginning may have been marked by something painful during her mother’s life. I have chosen not to sit too long inside that possibility, because some truths are too heavy to hold without proof, and some grief belongs to women who are no longer here to explain it. But it hurts my heart for them. For the women before me. On both sides of my lineage. For very different reasons, and yet somehow similar ones.
I do not say this to excuse harm. Pain may explain patterns, but it does not erase responsibility. A wound passed down is still a wound, and every generation has a choice in what they protect, what they repeat, and what they finally refuse to carry forward.
I can grieve the women before me and still protect the child I was. I can hold compassion for what may have happened to them and still tell the truth about what happened to me.
What makes this even more triggering is how complicated all of it has become. Trauma does not stay in one box. It spills into family, land, grief, inheritance, courtrooms, and the places we call home. He has inserted himself into a legal matter in the state I call home, as if proximity gives him a sense of entitlement. As if he has some right to claim from the life and legacy of the man he called father — the same man who had to raise what he was unable to protect. That kind of intrusion is its own wound. It is not only about what happened then. It is about watching the past keep reaching into the present. It is about having to defend peace, memory, family, and legacy from someone whose presence already represents harm.
And that is one of the hardest parts to explain: survivors are not only healing from what was done to them. Sometimes we are still forced to navigate the consequences, entitlement, and disruption caused by the people connected to that harm.
The Numbers Behind the Silence
I am not sharing statistics to turn pain into numbers. I am sharing them because the numbers prove what survivors already know: incest and child sexual abuse are not rare, and justice is not guaranteed.
RAINN states that about one-third of child sexual abuse cases involve a family member. RAINN also explains that family abuse can involve power imbalance, secrecy, dependency, emotional manipulation, threats, coercion, and loyalty conflicts.
That matters because family abuse carries its own kind of cage.
Children are not only carrying the abuse. They are often carrying family secrets, loyalty conflicts, fear of not being believed, fear of being blamed, fear of destroying the family, and fear of what will happen if they tell. Abusers know this. Silence is often part of the grooming. The shame never belonged to the child, but too often the child is the one forced to carry it. And this is not only a national wound. It touches the places I come from, too.
I am a child of New Mexico clay. I come from dust, heat, desert, survival, and deep roots. I know what it means for something tender to grow in hard ground. I know what it means for history to live in the body, in the family tree, in the land, and in the silence between generations.
In New Mexico, Children’s Advocacy Centers served 3,117 children in 2023. That same year, New Mexico CAC data recorded 2,542 alleged offenders, including 936 parents, 174 stepparents, and 490 other relatives.
Those numbers do not capture every child harmed.
They only show the children who made it into the system.
So when I say New Mexico is clay, I do not only mean earth.
I mean memory.
I mean lineage.
I mean the children who deserved softness and safety.
Louisiana is part of this story, too. It is the place where legal grief, family legacy, inheritance, and trauma have collided. It is another place where children’s pain has been documented in numbers that still cannot hold the full weight of what happens behind closed doors.
In Louisiana, Children’s Advocacy Centers served 6,144 children in 2023. Louisiana CAC data recorded 5,268 alleged offenders, including 1,635 parents, 318 stepparents, and 1,054 other relatives.
These places are not only maps to me.
They are memories.
They are clay.
They are courtrooms.
They are family trees.
They are graves, gardens, wounds, and seeds.
And when I look at the numbers, I do not see statistics floating somewhere far away.
I see children.
I see homes.
I see families.
I see the ones who were believed, the ones who were not, the ones who made it into reports, and the ones who were never counted at all.
Lockdown and the Children Behind Closed Doors
When the world locked down in 2020, many children were locked inside with the very people hurting them. Official reports did not tell the whole story. During the pandemic, some child abuse reports dropped because children were no longer being seen every day by teachers, counsellors, coaches, nurses, and other mandated reporters. But fewer reports did not mean fewer children were being harmed.
Silence is not safety.
During the early lockdown period, RAINN reported a rise in minors contacting the National Sexual Assault Hotline. Reports from 2020 described more minors reaching out for help during lockdown.
That truth haunts me. Some children were not only surviving abuse during lockdown. They were trying to find a way to whisper for help from the same homes where the abuse was happening. And some of those children may never see justice.
Not because what happened to them was not real. Not because their pain does not matter. But because systems fail. Evidence disappears. Families protect abusers. Cases are declined. Children are pressured into silence. Survivors grow up. Time passes. People move on. And sometimes, the person who was harmed is left holding the truth while everyone else argues about proof.
The Records, the Gaps, and the People Who Still Showed Up
I have also learned how hard it can be to find pieces of my own story on paper.
People who work within the state, across more than one office, shared with me that locating documents connected to my case has not been easy. For records tied to the 1980s through the early 2000s, that kind of difficulty is very real. Systems changed. Files moved. Documentation practices were not what they are now. Paper trails can become fragmented, misplaced, incomplete, or buried in places no one thinks to look.
That reality is painful.
Because survivors are often asked to prove what happened with records that broken systems did not always preserve well.
And still, I am thankful.
I am thankful that even inside a broken system, there were people who made sure I had a voice.
A social worker who showed up.
A CASA advocate who was not afraid to speak the hard truth.
Foster parents who were not afraid to love a broken child who resisted safety because safety did not feel familiar yet. They loved me anyway. They gave me a home I did not know how to receive. And somehow, all these years later, I still get to call them home. That does not erase what failed. But it reminds me that protection is possible.
Advocacy matters.
Safe adults matter.
Documentation matters.
Love matters. Especially for a child who has been taught to survive without trusting any of it.
Recent news in Louisiana brought another layer of that memory to the surface. Louisiana sought to extradite a California doctor accused of mailing abortion medication into the state. California Governor Gavin Newsom rejected the request, stating that the alleged conduct involved reproductive health care that is legal in California and that California would not assist another state in prosecuting a provider for that care. I know this is a complicated and deeply divided issue for many people.
But for me, it lands somewhere very specific. carrying a fear no child should ever have to carry. After I was placed in care, I told a friend something I was scared of. She told an adult. And my middle school nurse broke the rules to give me a pregnancy test. Thankfully, it was negative. I still think about that. I think about a child afraid enough to say it out loud. I think about the friend who listened. I think about the adult who acted. I think about the nurse who saw a child in fear and chose care. There are laws, and then there are children standing in front of adults with shaking hands and impossible questions.
I am not writing this to debate anyone’s beliefs. I am writing this because children who have been abused need protection before politics. They need safe adults. They need medical care. They need someone willing to hear the fear underneath the words.
That pregnancy test did not erase what happened. But it answered one terrifying question. And sometimes, for a child in crisis, one answered question can be a mercy.
Justice Is Not Guaranteed
People say, “Why didn’t you tell sooner?”
People say, “Why now?”
People say, “Are you sure?”
People say these things as if trauma follows a deadline.
But many survivors do not report right away. Some do not have the words. Some do not understand what happened until years later. Some are threatened. Some are groomed. Some are dependent on the person harming them. Some are surrounded by adults who choose comfort over protection. And even when survivors do report, justice is not promised.
RAINN reports that out of every 1,000 sexual assaults, 50 lead to arrests, 28 lead to felony convictions, and 25 perpetrators are sentenced to incarceration.
That number should make everyone uncomfortable.
It means survivors are often asked to be brave inside systems that may still fail them.
It means telling the truth does not always lead to accountability.
It means some people who caused lifelong harm will never experience consequences that match the damage they caused.
And it means some survivors will spend years, even decades, carrying what the justice system never fully held.
The Files, the Silence, and the Children Still Waiting
At the same time I was writing my own victim impact statement, Jeffrey Epstein was back in the news again.
The files.
The names.
The redactions.
The questions.
The victims. Seeing those headlines while carrying my own story felt heavy in a way I do not know how to fully explain. Because behind every file is a person. Behind every redaction is a life. Behind every public debate about who knew what, who enabled what, and who may still be protected, some survivors were children once. Survivors who were groomed. Silenced. Threatened. Bought. Disbelieved. Used. And then forced to watch the world argue over their pain. My heart breaks for them. Some of them may never see justice. Some may never hear every name spoken out loud. Some may never see every enabler held accountable. Some may carry the truth for the rest of their lives, while the powerful remain protected by money, systems, secrecy, and time.
They are part of why I share this.
Not because my story is the same as theirs.
But because silence protects the wrong people.
Because children deserve more than sealed records and delayed accountability.
Because survivors deserve more than curiosity from the public. They deserve care. They deserve protection. They deserve justice. They deserve to be believed before they are broken. And if my voice can be one small part of breaking the silence — for myself, for the child I was, for the children locked behind doors, and for the survivors whose names we may never know — then I will use it.
Not perfectly.
Not without trembling.
But truthfully.
20 Years Later
I am choosing not to share the full letter here. Some words are sacred because of what it took to survive them. But I will say this: I wrote it. I told the truth. I let the child in me speak. And when I was done, I could breathe a little deeper. Writing a victim impact statement twenty years later felt like opening a door I had nailed shut.
Behind that door was grief.
Rage.
Fear.
Confusion. A younger version of me who still needed someone to say, “I believe you.” A woman version of me who needed to say, “This still mattered.” A mother version of me who understands, more deeply than ever, what children deserve.
Children deserve protection.
Children deserve to be believed.
Children deserve adults who choose truth over image.
Children deserve families that do not protect predators in the name of peace.
And survivors deserve to heal without being forced to make everyone else comfortable.
I do not know what justice will look like for every survivor. I do not know if every case will make it to a courtroom. I do not know if every victim impact statement will be heard the way it deserves to be heard.
But I know this:
The truth still matters twenty years later.
The child still mattered twenty years ago.
And the survivor still matters now.
For Anyone Reading This With Their Own Wound
This is not your shame.
What happened to you was not your fault.
Whether you were told immediately, told years later, never told, tried to tell and were ignored, or are still searching for the words, your story matters.
You are not weak because it still hurts.
You are not too late because time has passed.
You are not less worthy of justice because healing has been complicated.
Some wounds are carried quietly for years before they finally find language.
And sometimes, twenty years later, the bravest thing a survivor can do is tell the truth again — not because the world earned it, but because the child inside them deserves to be heard.
References & Survivor Support
RAINN — Incest and sexual abuse by a family member
RAINN explains that incest refers to sexual abuse or contact between family members, and states that about one-third of child sexual abuse cases involve a family member.
RAINN — Children and sexual violence
RAINN explains that sexual abuse by a family member can involve power imbalances, emotional manipulation, financial dependence, threats, coercion, loyalty, fear, and confusion.
https://rainn.org/get-informed/issues/children-and-sexual-violence
RAINN — Criminal justice system statistics
RAINN reports that out of every 1,000 sexual assaults, 50 lead to arrests, 28 lead to felony convictions, and 25 perpetrators are sentenced to incarceration.
https://rainn.org/facts-statistics-the-scope-of-the-problem/statistics-the-criminal-justice-system
National Children’s Alliance — New Mexico 2023 Children’s Advocacy Centers statistics
NCA reported that New Mexico Children’s Advocacy Centers served 3,117 children in 2023 and recorded 2,542 alleged offenders, including parents, stepparents, and other relatives.
https://www.nationalchildrensalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/New-Mexico-Annual-2023.pdf
National Children’s Alliance — Louisiana 2023 Children’s Advocacy Centers statistics
NCA reported that Louisiana Children’s Advocacy Centers served 6,144 children in 2023 and recorded 5,268 alleged offenders, including parents, stepparents, and other relatives.
https://www.nationalchildrensalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Louisiana-Annual-2023.pdf
National support:
RAINN offers confidential, trauma-informed, 24/7 support for survivors and loved ones, and its National Sexual Assault Hotline is available by phone, online chat, or text. Call 800-656-HOPE (4673), chat at RAINN.org/hotline, or text HOPE to 64673.
New Mexico support:
The New Mexico Sexual Assault Helpline helps survivors find support services and Sexual Assault Nurse Exam resources, and the New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs says free services are available for survivors of sexual abuse or assault.
Louisiana support:
The Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault offers free, confidential, anonymous support for survivors and loved ones statewide by phone, text, or chat. LaFASA lists its 24/7 call line as 1-888-995-7273 and its text line as 225-351-SAFE (7233).
For Native survivors and families:
StrongHearts Native Helpline is a 24/7 confidential and anonymous domestic and sexual violence helpline for Native Americans and Alaska Natives. Call or text 1-844-7NATIVE (762-8483) or chat online.
California Governor’s Office — Louisiana extradition request involving a California doctor and abortion medication
The California Governor’s Office stated that Governor Gavin Newsom rejected Louisiana’s request to extradite a California physician accused of providing medication abortion that is legal in California.
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