Two Best Works:
Work1: Cultural Identity Profile
Geography: I live in an urban neighborhood called Roslindale in MA. Living in Roslindale has affected my way of dressing and my overall attitude toward things. In Boston it’s cold so I can’t dress the same way that someone who lives in the south would all year round. The way people are in the city is different from the way people are in the suburbs. In the city people are colder towards others and even rude at times, but in suburban places people are a lot closer to each other. In urban areas we are more open-minded because we are surrounded by all kinds of people. We are very diverse while in the suburbs people are more close-minded because for the most part it’s made up of the same people. Government: I’m independent when it comes to my political views. The reason why is because there are many issues that I’m split on, so I go by which candidate i think is better and shares closer beliefs to me. My family is made up of democrats. We don’t talk about politics very often because since we have some different views that we feel strongly about and it often escalates into an argument. Politics isn’t something that plays a major factor in how I view the world, but I do believe that everyone should know where they stand when it comes to politics and vote because it’s their future that they’re deciding. Religion: I am not part of any religion and do not believe in God. I am an atheist, but I respect and even support others beliefs. I abide by my own rules and do what I believe is right. I wouldn’t change the way I do things for anyone or anything. I love the way I live my life, and not having a religion is a very big part of who I am. Most people don’t like that, and give me a hard time over it so I feel it’s made me a stronger person because I’ve learned to deal with criticism. Economics: My family’s socio-economic status is lower-middle class. For me my social class isn’t important to the way I see myself, but it does make a difference to how I see the world. I don’t feel like any more or less of a person due to my social class, but when it comes to how I view the world it does make a difference. When I see someone buy something really expensive a lot of the time I feel like it’s not worth it, and that’s because I see that my parents work hard for the money they earn. On the other hand if I were born in a rich household I probably would spend that same amount of money or more and not feel any kind of guilt afterward. Work is very important to me because it’s what allows you to make money and succeed in life. To work shows that you’re a capable and responsible person. I plan on majoring in speech pathology and doing it in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. I’m really looking forward to it because I’m helping people and improving their lives by doing something that comes easy to me. Art: Art, architecture, dance, and music are very important to me because they show change, development, and creativity. My life wouldn’t be the same without music in particular. At times when I’ve felt hopeless music has pulled me through. All art is unique and tells a story that inspires many different kinds of people. Art is fundamental to life. Science/Technology: I’m very involved with technology. I use my cell phone to IM, text message, and call friends all the time. I’m usually on my laptop when I’m home whether it’s to use the internet or to type a paper. Without the scientific experiments we wouldn’t have technology. Science affects everything and everyone around us. We are able to save time, obtain knowledge, and keep in touch with people by just a pressing a couple of buttons. Life is so much more convenient and easier because of science and technology. Education: My own education is very important to me because I want to be aware of my surroundings, and be a successful person. My educational goals are to finish high school, go to college, and continue studying until I obtain my doctorate. I see the difference between having a degree and not having one. My dad has a doctorate while my mom didn’t finish high school. My mom has to put a lot more physical effort than my dad and she has pains all over her body because of it. I wouldn’t want to go through that, and I know that if she had had the opportunity that I have to go to college and make a professional herself she would’ve. I have the opportunity and support that my mom didn’t have, and I refuse to pass it up. I want to be independent and be able to be there for my parents when they get older like they’ve been for me my whole life. My education is my future. Social/Culture: My race is something I’m proud of. I am mainly Brazilian, Puerto Rican, and American. In my home race isn’t an issue because we are actually very mixed. I speak both Spanish and Portuguese and knowing to speak them is very important to me. It says so much about a person when they’re born and raised in a country different from their parents, but also know how to speak their parents’ native tongue. Keeping traditional foods and the style of dressing is another way to keep the culture alive in your own way. Where your parents come from shapes you as a person because they are the ones who tell you right from wrong when you don’t understand yet, so what they show or teach you as a child usually sticks. My mom has a certain openness about things that’s part of her culture and I picked that up subconsciously. My parents played a huge role in me becoming the person I am today. I feel that there are certain expectations that I need to meet not only for myself, but for my parents too because they’ve given me so much and support me when I need it. The way that they raised me definitely has a lot to do with who I am.
Work 2: Interviews (Names have been changed to protect the identities of these individuals.)
Shauna (former social worker: 2 yrs.) 3/10/09 1:39pm
Stem from
-“I think that the person that is committing the abuse is probably sexually abused themselves or they have some other issues that they need to work out while they kinda put this on the child.”
-when a child says a person did something to them, their parents sometimes say “you’re lying. they would never do that.” You need to believe them “because if you don’t, things are going to get worse for that child because if their own family won’t believe them they have no security for them…”
Short and long term effects
-“You’re either going to react outward or you’re going to react inward.”
Short term:
-“There isn’t really much I can do until that child realizes that hey you know, this is not my fault. It really happened to me which is trigging a lot of these feelings and I’m really acting out.”
-as teenager “they get caught up a lot of this prostitution rank where they get exploited.”
-“A lot of them would run away.”
Long term:
-“…they wouldn’t have stable relationships. They wouldn’t know how to get close to someone whether it’s a friendship or anything.”
-“They didn’t learn what good relationships are so it affects them in every aspect of their life.”
-“They’ll really go through life not trusting anyone, and that’s very dangerous for anyone if you can’t trust anyone. A lot of them won’t even trust themselves to even be around a certain sex.”
contribution to community
-“could have a good impact… they’ll be able to actually let people know about the issue of what’s going on in the community what’s going on in their own family.”
-positive effects: “They turn out to be really good members of society.” “Lawyers that can really fight these cases…” “Therapists, social workers that really understand what it’s like and what the child is going through.”
-negative effects: “drugs, prostitution, suicide”
How can they rebuild?
-therapy
Nancy (former social worker, volunteer at Dot Well: 5 months) 3/11/09 10:33am
Stem from
-“childhood”
Short term and long term effects
-“depends on your mental status”
short term:
-“you go through this phase of “should I tell someone?”
long term:
-“I’m over it.”
Contribution to community
-“it depends on your family background. If you have a strong family then pretty much you’re raised with a strong mind so I’m a strong minded person so I don’t think it really affected me as far as my community as an adult. Now, as a teenager it affected my community because I was trying to get everybody to pretty much kill every boy. ”
-“It could affect your community because you bottle things up inside, and some people just aren’t strong enough to move on.”
Help rebuild
-“the hotlines that they have now”
-“My therapy came as a teenager. Talking to my friends, that was my therapy.”
Affected trust
-Ohhhh hell yes!”
-“All my friends were not virgins. I stayed a virgin, so it did kinda affect me. It made me aware that you don’t gotta do this. I had ups and downs with it. I lost these guys that were trying to kick it in to give them some but then I realized too that that’s all they wanted.”
-stayed until she was 18
Abe (volunteer at Dot Well-Codman Health Center: 1.5 month) 3/11/09 12:32pm
Stem from
-It could stem from the internal which could be the home. It could come from your peers. It could come from who’s completely foreign to you that you don’t know.”
Short term and long term effects
Long term effects:
-“One word that comes to mind is insecurity. They become insecure of body.”
-“They can become vey untrusting of people.”
-“I guess it would also have you know psychological issues as well do to having someone to invade your personal space like that and knowing that someone has enforced their will upon that individual.”
-“could end up becoming suicidal”
Contribution to community
-“They decide they want to make it their mission to raise the awareness in the community or they can just shut down and be so affected by that particular issue that they don’t trust anybody, don’t want to be bothered anybody, and they just pretty much shell in and want to protect their own little world that they’re in.”
Help rebuild
-“I know there are some hotlines, Boston Rape Crisis.”
Andy (Social Capital Inc. Volunteer: 1.5 yr) 3/12/09 11:52am
Stem from
-“I think that a lot of the people that do the abusing sometimes they have had it happen to them in the past so it becomes a programmed response.”
-“Sometimes it has to do with power and if they feel powerless they feel that this is a way they can exert their power.”
-“It’s a lot more of a dominance issue than I think it is a sexual issue and it’s a way for them to have some control over things that happen in their life by controlling someone else’s life.”
Short term and long term effects
short term effects:
“The short term effects are definitely not being able to trust people. For a very long time I couldn’t trust men at all.”
-“What would happen was I’d have a hard time with my relationships with my friends when I was in school because I didn’t know how to interact properly with male peers my own age so I would tend to flock towards female peers my own age and then the girls that were my age didn’t want anything to do with me because I was a boy and when you’re in elementary school that’s just how it works.”
-“And then it led to in my middle school years me getting involved with girls romantically because that was what they wanted, and then it probably led to me having inappropriate sexual relations with girls my age when I was in my freshman year in high school.”
-“It was all consensual. It was just maybe the wrong time to do it.”
-“And then it led to in my adult life me not being able to have relationships with girls at all. I mean it’s been 6 years since I’ve had a real relationship with a girl that had any sort of substance because it’s really hard for me to not come across as intense or overbearing because due to the molestation that happened when I was a child I have a hard time with boundaries and understanding what’s an appropriate response to a certain emotion and what’s an inappropriate response to a certain emotion and that also has to do beyond being a child of sexual abuse I was also a child of physical and mental abuse from my mother and on top of that my parents are both alcoholics and my mother’s a recovering addict so I had to deal with drug abuse in my life too so a lot of my responses; it’s hard to tell which ones come directly from the sexual abuse and which ones come from being physically and verbally abused and all the drug addiction stuff that goes on there too.”
-“…caused me to shut down more than to act out. The way that I would act out was by being promiscuous and manipulative.”
long term effects:
-“I lived a lie and that’s not where I can be anymore.”
-“A hug would’ve been a great thing to get.”
-“There’s no affection in my life.”
-“I suffer from long term depression.”
-“If I had a better support system when I was younger, that would’ve helped a lot.”
Contribution to community
-“In my case, it drives me because I want to make sure that the things that happened to victimize me at a young age don’t happen to someone else so what I tend to do is throw myself out there fairly strongly to a lot of people to sort of you know “hey I’m here. I’m here to help.” And what happens is I tend to sacrifice a lot of my own welfare stuff to take care of other people just because that’s the type of person I’ve become due to whatever factors in my life.”
-“I think the contributions I make to the community are overall helpful.”
Help rebuild
-“I think what would be helpful is addressing that it’s ok to talk about it because for a long time I didn’t talk about it at all. It was just not something to talk about.”
-“Education in the area of just because you’re a victim doesn’t mean it’s your fault. Education in that direction letting people know that it’s ok and that with the help of others you’ll be able to move forward in a positive direction in your life.”
-“There are some statistics that say that people that were abused then become abusers later on and I think that through positive reinforcement…” it can be stopped.
-when asked his mom she said, “”You never told me that. You just said you didn’t like the person so he stopped babysitting you.” And I think that that’s strange because I think that if I had a liaison or someone to help me fully develop the thought when I was...because it happened to me the first time, before I was in kindergarten so I was around like four or five years old. If I had some counseling at that age to help fully develop my thoughts maybe my mother would’ve understood why I didn’t like my babysitter and why I was acting out the way that I was when I was younger.”
Tony (SCI volunteer) 3/13.09 1:08pm
Stem from
-“People that don’t understand that they’re grown ass people.”
-“It’s a mind thing.”
-“When somebody wants to take something from somebody it’s wrong. We gotta understand that. Now you taking someone’s sex, you really off the hook. That’s way more than me taking his phone when he’s not looking. You’re violating my personal space and my body. You know I can’t really say where it stems from. All I can say is it’s just a mind thing.”
-“We have to find those people, man. We have to deal with those people.”
-committing sexual abuseà“It’s like it’s a disease.”
Short term and long term effects
Long term effect:
-“If it’s not dealt with it can be a reoccurring event.”
Contribution to community
-“They can grow up and speak out on why they’re speaking out, why they were sexually abused and what they think should be done about sexual abuse and how they dealt with it being sexually abused.”
Help rebuild
-“We have to be able to talk out, but you want to be in a room where everybody’s on the same page as you. They’re to give you understanding about sexual abuse or they’ve been sexually abused themselves.”