Atefeh Sebdani speaks of her feelings of insecurity because of being repeatedly raped as a child
Rejection, criticisms, unkind words lead children to feel or think less of themselves. Children can too be prone to instances where they lose self-esteem and become insecure. Therefore, parents should always be there for their children, to uplift them and to make them feel more wanted, more loved. In 1991, about one thousand children of members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) were separated from their parents, trafficked to Western countries, left with foster families who were MEK sympathizers.
These children have endured traumatic experiences which left them with deep feelings of insecurity. Atefeh Sebdani, now in her thirties, mother of three children, is one of the children of Mujahed parents who was repeatedly raped by her foster father in Sweden. The MEK had handed her and her two brothers to that foster family because they were sympathizers of the group.
The experience of child sexual abuse can change the way children and young people understand their world, the people in it and where they belong. Their understanding of themselves and the world can become distorted, and create mistrust, fear, and betrayal. Depending on the relationship and duration of the sexual harm, subsequent relational trauma could affect their ability to connect with others and themselves. However, Atefeh is a successful Swedish citizen now who has almost healed from the trauma but she still has hard times with her memoirs.
She has published her biography, she has been the subject of many interviews, lectures and documentaries as an example of hundreds of orphaned children of the MEK cult. Yet, there are some moments in her life that profoundly recalls the traumatic moments of her childhood. As she shares in her Facebook account, Atefeh’s younger daughter Saba has recently been hospitalized for a surgery. Caring for her little daughter, Atefeh remembers her own heart-breaking experiences of hospital and doctor as an abandoned, sexually assaulted child. She acknowledges the shortages of her childhood. That there was no mother there for her to show her how to be caring for her children:
“It is with the children that I am allowed to confirm my experiences.
It is through them that I know that a child who has been sedated for surgery and will wake up in a hospital should not do it alone.
It is through my friends that I am told that a child who wakes up from anesthesia can scream and be angry. That it is completely normal.
It’s only now that I understand that I was completely normal when I screamed (and probably kicked and fought) in my wake in the hospital as a child. To the extent that the nurses had to put up the railing on the bunk.
It was their voices I heard when I was groggy. Their hands that held me and comforted me at the same time.”
As her mother was far from her in the MEK’s military camp in Iraqi deserts, isolated and brainwashed by the group’s cult-like ideology, Atefeh Sebdani cried calling her, now she knows that she should be here by the side of her little Saba:
“It is only now that I understand that it was not normal that no parent was there when I lay there abandoned and exposed.
As I was ashamed when the nurses later told my foster mother how I had been. I who always screamed in my sleep from my nightmares had now done it in front of everyone.
Rampant.
And then they told me that I had screamed for my mother…
Mother.
Which mother?
It didn’t tell the story to the unsuspecting nurses who heard my cries echo across the hall.
Saba, on the other hand, you don’t have to shout. I’m lying here next to you.”
The feelings of insecurity and the evil memories of rape once more get back to Atefeh with the notion of “doctor”, a person who is supposed to be secure and trustable, but in the mind of little Atefeh, the doctor’s appointment is a traumatic return to the moments of sexual assaults.
She asks the Swedish health care and medical guild about the feelings of insecurity she gets as an adult whose parents had left her behind to fight for the MEK and the MEK had eventually left her in the hands of a rapist family. That is why she is not afraid of the surgery knife, but she panics the look and the hands of the doctor:
“If the doctor is of a character that reminds you of the person who raped you, abused you, ruined your life, then you just have to swallow it.
I have never been afraid of injections. Nor for the knives that cut into my body.
But I’m afraid of the man who will grope my naked, exposed body with his rough hands. Be in his grasp. Again. Under his power. Again. Feel his gaze on my nakedness. Again.
Feeling powerless. Again.
Feel how I stop breathing. Again.
Feel how I shake uncontrollably. Again.
– I’m not afraid of the knife! i want to scream
It’s you I’m afraid of!
Because if it were so good, that I even had a chance to think about the knife.
Instead, I see looks and feel hands from a man who groped me so many times long before I knew I could stop even though I always knew it was wrong. Long before my body took shape and it was still a desire for the man. Male with black hair, crooked nose and freckles. Which is everywhere around us, not least among our doctors. But I was called and I showed up.
For who am I to say that my body trembles from the trauma of his hands and eyes and not from the knife he puts into me?
Where is the care’s responsibility to take care of even us who tremble with other worries and who had wished, please, give me another to touch my body!”
As a victim of sexual violence, you could be feeling furious, desperate, revengeful, hopeless, and empty, all at the same time. This is a perfectly normal response to such a traumatizing event. Atefeh has survived and recovered from sexual violence. She has struggled with all the different thoughts and emotions that she once had a hard time to cope with. But this does not validate the crimes of the Cult of Rajavi as the main responsible for the traumas the children of Mujahedin endured. The cases of the MEK children and MEK child soldiers should be investigated by the International human rights bodies. The MEK leaders must be brought to justice for what they did with hundreds of their orphans.
Mazda Parsi