The effect of sexual abuse on children’s mental health
Literary extract: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
1 The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril, sap-green days, walking up and
down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear.
Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile
effort to fly. Beating the air, a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue void it could not
5 reach—could not even see—but which filled the valleys of the mind.
We tried to see her without looking at her, and never, never went near. Not because she was
absurd, or repulsive, or because we were frightened, but because we had failed her. Our flowers
never grew. I was convinced that Frieda was right, that I had planted them too deeply. How
could I have been so sloven? So we avoided Pecola Breedlove—forever.
10 And the years folded up like pocket handkerchiefs. Sammy left town long ago; Cholly died in
the workhouse; Mrs. Breedlove still does housework. And Pecola is somewhere in that little
brown house she and her mother moved to on the edge of town, where you can see her even
now, once in a while. The birdlike gestures are worn away to a mere picking and plucking her
way between the tire rims and the sunflowers, between Coke bottles and milkweed, among all
15 the waste and beauty of the world—which is what she herself was. All of our waste which we
dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which
she gave to us. All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on
her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her
guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a
20 sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us
generous. Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares. And she let us,
and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her
frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.
And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed;
25 we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in
order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for
intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing
in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.
She, however, stepped over into madness, a madness which protected her from us simply
30 because it bored us in the end.
