III. More About the Children Available for Adoption, Page 10
What is Sexual Abuse?
Any use of children for sexual gratification is abuse. Children are often taught to beware of strangers. Wrong. We should teach our children to beware of their family and of their parents’ friends. The great majority of sexual abuse takes place in the home or nearby, and the vast majority of abuse is by people well known to the victim: relatives, neighbours, parents’ friends, clergymen, youth leaders, care workers and baby-sitters are the most common culprits. The stranger in the dirty mackintosh comes way down the list. Abuse happens to both boys and girls and both men and women abuse children. Abuse is not confined to the poor, to council estates or the inner cities. It happens in the Green Belt and in the families of the great and good as well. Some parents even rent their own children out by the hour.
Sexual abuse can consist of anything from inappropriate touching to full penetrative intercourse, and can be accompanied by perverse specially-favoured treatment, or more often by threats and physical injuries. It can start at almost any age: even tiny babies have been subjected to sexual abuse. (Some cultures believe that intercourse with a virgin will cure AIDS, and who is more likely to be a virgin than a little baby?) In other families it doesn’t start until puberty. In some families sexual abuse is routine across the generations, with father, uncles and grandfathers all raping the children of the family. Abusers often blame the child for being sexually provocative. Some fathers disguise abuse as sexual instruction or initiation. Ritual or Satanic sexual abuse has been reported often but there have been few convictions in any country, but abuse by organised groups of paedophiles is not rare. Sexually abused people may become abusers in turn, although it is by no means inevitable.
In addition to being prematurely sexualised, these children are often ashamed and afraid, and find it very hard to talk about it to others, which is one reason why it may not surface until years later. Other children are so traumatised that they block out all memory of the abuse for years, although it will usually result in other abnormal behaviour. Some abused children act out their troubled feelings in oblique ways, such as harming themselves, obsessive cleanliness or tidiness, or phobias.
Children are not born knowing what is and is not appropriate sexual behaviour. Children who have been sexually abused may have learned that sexual behaviour is what gets them love (or at least, what passed for love in that relationship). They may have no idea that sexual behaviour between siblings or adults and children is not normal. They may make sexual advances to family members, friends or total strangers simply because that’s what they learned to do. Their behaviour can be very shocking, even when it is not overtly sexual. They need careful teaching to change their behaviour, without giving them the impression that they are bad for what they do. They need to be shown non-sexualised love.
It is quite common for sexual abuse to be concealed by a child all during foster placement, and not revealed to the adoptive family until well after placement or formal adoption. This is usually because what she has endured is so shameful to her, or she has been so effectively threatened by the abuser that it takes many months or even years for her to feel safe enough to disclose.
© Roger Ridley Fenton
