A companion post to episode 17 of The Chicana Therapist Podcast
A quick heads-up before we dive in: this post touches on the culture of silence around child sexual abuse. We’re not getting graphic, this episode is about where the silence came from, not the details of abuse itself. If this is a heavy topic for you, take care of yourself first. Pause, skip, or come back when you’re ready.
The rule nobody explained
If you grew up in a Latino household, there’s a good chance you know this rule by heart, even if you never heard it explained:
No hacemos pijamadas. We don’t do sleepovers.
For some of us, that was the whole conversation. Porque no. Porque yo dije. For others, we got a little more, a phrase that sounded like a reason without actually being one:
Uno nunca sabe. One never knows.
It has the shape of an explanation. But it doesn’t name a person, a fear, or an experience. It just gestures at danger and leaves us to fill in the rest, or to just carry the caution without ever understanding where it came from.
And it wasn’t only sleepovers. It was a whole web of quiet rules pointing in the same direction: don’t be alone with the tíos, don’t go to certain houses without a parent, don’t sit on certain laps, always get walked to the bathroom at parties. None of it fully explained
At the time, most of us just experienced these rules as strict (my parents are just overprotective) , maybe even embarrassing when we were the ones getting picked up early from a sleepover everyone else got to stay at. What we didn’t have was the context. What we got instead was the restriction, and if we were lucky, uno nunca sabe standing in for the real answer.
Where the rule actually came from
These rules didn’t come from nowhere. They came from something, usually a mother, an abuela, or someone else in the family line protecting the only way she knew how. Not with a conversation or an explanation, but with a rule.
So the real question isn’t why were my parents so strict? It’s: what did they know, sense, or survive that made “uno nunca sabe” feel like the safest thing they could say?
Here’s some context that helps explain it:
- At least 1 in 4 girls in the U.S. will experience child sexual abuse.
- Roughly 90% of that abuse is committed by someone the child and family already know and trust…not a stranger.
- Of cases reported to law enforcement, 34% of perpetrators are family members, and 59% are acquaintances (a family friend, a neighbor, someone already inside the circle of trust)
Put that together, and the threat our moms and abuelitas were quietly protecting us from was almost never el desconocido.It was someone already in our lives. And naming that risk out loud would have meant naming someone we knew, which is a much harder sentence to say than “we don’t do sleepovers.”
Why silence instead of a conversation
A few things were stacked on top of each other here:
Shame. In a lot of our families, abuse, when it happened, got absorbed and buried rather than spoken about. It was treated as something that would bring vergüenza to the whole family, not just to whoever caused the harm. That shame wasn’t fair or accurate, but it was real, and it kept a lot of people quiet.
Machismo and the protection of men. No se habla mal de la familia. Naming a tío or a padrino threatened the whole family structure, so it often felt easier, safer, even, to restrict a child’s access than to name why. Underneath that sat the belief that así son los hombres, which put the burden on children to protect themselves rather than on men to not cause harm.
No language. A lot of our moms and abuelas were never given the words either. Nobody ever sat them down and taught them how to talk about this. So instead of a conversation, they built a wall: no sleepovers, no estar solo con el tío, etc.
Their own history. Sometimes the silence wasn’t about protecting a reputation at all, it was rooted in something that had already happened to her, or to someone before her. Instead of becoming a story she could tell us, it became a rule she gave us instead.
What the silence cost us
None of this is about placing blame on our mothers and abuelas. Most of them were working with what they had. But it’s worth naming honestly what that silence protected against and what it cost.
What it protected: restriction genuinely works, in a narrow sense. If a child isn’t left alone with someone, that closes off an opportunity for harm. Rules, even unspoken ones, can prevent harm.
What it cost us:
- No language for our own bodies. Because the danger was never named, a lot of us grew up without vocabulary for our own boundaries and instincts. We knew no without knowing why, which meant that if something ever did feel wrong, we didn’t always have the words to identify it, or the permission to say something.
- The danger only ever pointed outward. The rule was aimed at other houses, other tíos, other situations, never inward, toward teaching us that our bodies belonged to us no matter who was asking or where.
- All the responsibility landed on prevention. The model was: restrict, monitor, control access, and harm won’t happen. That quietly puts the entire weight on the potential victim and their family, instead of on the person who might cause harm. And when prevention inevitably fails, because no amount of restriction covers every scenario, that same framework leaves a child feeling like it must have been their fault.
- Disclosure became harder. Think about what a child would have to do, inside a household built on silence, to come forward: break the family’s core rule, and do it about someone already inside the circle of trust. That’s an enormous ask for a child who’s already scared and confused.
- Shame got inherited, even without an event. Even kids who were never harmed absorbed the message that this topic was so unspeakable we don’t even say the word.
- It could isolate survivors. A child living in a family with no language for abuse is often left to carry it completely alone, not because anyone chose that for them, but because the entire structure around them left no way to come forward and be met with belief.
Keeping the protection, adding the language
No hacemos pijamadas was never really about sleepovers. It was protection, built the only way our families knew how, through restriction and silence, with uno nunca sabe standing in for a conversation nobody had the words or safety to have.
We get to do something different now. Not instead of protection, but with it.
That means:
- Teaching kids their bodies belong to them, no matter who’s asking.
- Teaching them that if something feels wrong, they can say so and will be believed.
- Teaching them clearly that responsibility for abuse never belongs to a child, but it belongs entirely to whoever chooses to cause harm.
Protection doesn’t have to mean only restriction. It can also mean language, trust, and the assurance that whatever happens, they will be believed, comforted, and supported.
This is generational work. We’re not undoing what our families did, we’re building on it. Keep the watchfulness. Just give it words.
If this post brought something up for you — something you’ve been carrying, or never shared with anyone — you don’t have to carry it alone. Consider talking to a therapist, ideally someone trained to hold this kind of experience with you. You don’t need the language for it right away. You just don’t have to be the only one who knows.
Listen to the full episode of the Chicana Therapist Podcast here, and sign up for the newsletter at TheChicanaTherapist.com for updates on new episodes, blog posts, and upcoming local and international events. Follow along on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.
P.S. — Dr. Xochilt just got back from scouting Tlaquepaque, Jalisco for a possible spring retreat. Sign up for the newsletter at thechicanatherapist.com to be first to hear the details.