Alyssa Lies

This song makes me cry every time I hear it. It speaks such an important and powerful message to me as a teacher and as an abuse survivor. As a teacher, I often wonder what I would do if I found out one of my students was being abused at home and I pray that if it's a situation I ever have to face, God will give me the courage to do whatever it takes to protect my student. As a survivor of abuse, it makes me wonder which of the students that walk through our halls every day are being abused. Before I started teaching this year, I was an aide and one of my responsibilities was to do recess every day. I used to sit there some days and watch the students play and interact with each other, wondering which of them were being abused. Statistically speaking, it's a fact that some of our students are being abused. As a teacher, and a fellow survivor, that kills me inside, especially since there's usually no way to tell unless they say something or there is blatant physical evidence. Some of the girls at my school remind me of myself when I was their age and that scares me because I know why I was acting that way. I was a tomboy, I was a smart-alec, and always played the role of the 'people pleaser'. When I see those traits or behavior in some of our students, I get worried. It's almost like I have this intuition when it comes to certain students, like I wouldn't be surprised to find out later down the road that they were being abused. None of those 'intuitions' have ever proved true, and might never be, but they are still in my gut for whatever reason and I feel powerless to do anything about it. Without any kind of proof, what do you do?

Although it really has nothing to do with what I've written so far, there's something else about our school that really disturbs me as a survivor. I work at a Lutheran school and Martin Luther wrote all kinds of prayers that we, as teachers, are supposed to teach our students to memorize. Because I'm not a member of a Lutheran church, or 'of the Lutheran faith' as they would say, I don't teach religion to my students. I take my students to another class and that teacher does the religion lesson for the day. One of Luther's prayers is the Morning Prayer which starts out, "I thank you my heavenly Father, through Jesus Christ, Your dear Son, that You have kept me this night from all harm and danger..." If I had been made to memorize and say that prayer every morning at school, I would have been even more troubled than I already was! The way I saw it back then, in my child mind, God didn't protect me from my grandfather. He didn't stop what was happening. My issues with God were big enough without the added issue of having thank Him every morning for something I didn't think He had done. I can't imagine the pain in the hearts of our little students who are subjected to unspeakable violence during the night as they stand there the next morning reciting this prayer. Personally, I don't say use this prayer in my classroom. I do pray every morning before we start our day and every afternoon before we go home, but I pray from my heart. I just have real issues with that prayer.

All this is to say we have a great responsibility to they children in our lives. I personally believe that if a person even remotely suspects, and has even the tiniest of proof, that a child is being abused, they should report it.  I would rather report it and be wrong than not report it and be right. The lives of our children are at stake!