SECRETS: The World Through the Eyes of the Sexual Abuse Victim

You don't take a baby for a ride on a roller coaster. It's too stimulating, fearful, and emotionally overwhelming. Infants don't have enough information to deal with the experience. It would be traumatic for them.

The same is true about any sexualized behavior with a child. They're not ready for it. Sexual abuse is wrong for Christian, moral, and ethical reasons. It's also wrong simply because of the damage it does to children.

Sexual abuse means using a child for the adult's sexual gratification. Many behaviors can traumatize a child. Some behaviors our culture would see as "milder" forms of sexual abuse can be as traumatizing as intercourse.

For a child, abuse can be hearing sexualized jokes, looking at pornographic magazines or movies, or watching adults engaged in sexual activity. Abuse includes digital penetration, fondling a child's genitals or requesting the child fondle the adult's genitals, oral sex, anal sex, and vaginal intercourse.

Although both men and women are abusers, most often the offender is male. By the time they reach adulthood, 1 out of 4 women and 1 out of 7 men will have been victims of sexual abuse. Some will recover to lead normal, mentally healthy lives. But most won't without professional help.

A factor important to recovery is the severity of the trauma. As we all have different thresholds of pain, so children have different levels of how they respond to and handle trauma. Several factors increase the trauma.

One is if there is violence or the threat of violence. "If you tell, I'll..." "If you don't do what I want you to do, I'll..." Sometimes the behavior hurts the child, or the perpetrator beats the child up first and then molests him or her.

The length of time a child is exposed to abuse increases the trauma. One isolated incident is terrifying, but is usually not as damaging as a history of prolonged abuse.

Traumatization increases if the abuser teaches sexualized behaviors to the child. The abuse takes on a seductive quality. This makes the child feel more like a participant than a victim, so intensifies the child's guilt.

Also important is the child's relationship to the abuser. We think of perpetrators as being "dirty old men who jump out of the bushes." In fact, very few of them are. Eighty-five percent of reported sexual assaults on children are by people the child knows. Abuse is even more traumatic if the offender is one who is supposed to be in a nurturing role: parent, stepparent, uncle, pastor, teacher, day care provider, babysitter.

The lines the perpetrator uses can be as traumatizing as the event itself. "If your father really loved you, he'd do this. This is normal." "If you tell anybody, I'll kill your puppy." "If we don't do this, Mom is going to start drinking again." This places a tremendous responsibility on a powerless child.

Sometimes, especially for adolescents, victims develop a distorted sense of power. They're in a celebrated status. "This is something Dad and Mom don't do, but Dad and I do." They feel they can get what they want by being sexualized.

David Finkelhor, author of Child Sexual Abuse and Source Book on Child Sexual Abuse, outlined four areas in which children are traumatized. These are:

Sexualization

Children learn about sex before they should. This causes them to move in one of two directions.

Some won't be able to stand any kind of closeness or physical contact. This is most common with children who have been threatened with violence. Depressed and seclusive, they aren't interested in dating, sex, or intimacy.

Others become extremely sexualized and see every relationship sexually. Easily stimulated, these people respond sexually to situations others wouldn't consider sexual. They're promiscuous, experiencing a high incidence of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. A large percentage of prostitutes and people who pose for pornography were sexually abused as children.

Stigmatization
Stigmatization is a response to the shame victims feel. They not only think they did something bad, they think they're bad people. Several patients have described, "There's a big, black blot in me. If anyone gets close, they'll see it."

Often they view themselves as participants, not victims. They withdraw from others. They don't want anyone to get to know them because they think others can tell what they've done.

Powerlessness
When you're a child and an adult is involved in any activity with you, you're in the less powerful position. Even if the child was talked into it or participated somewhat willingly, the adult was still in control.

Victims feel powerless. There's nothing they can do to protect themselves. They have no personal boundaries. One person described the situation like this: "I felt like I was a soccer ball lying in the middle of the field, waiting to get kicked."

There's even a correlation between being a victim of sexual abuse as a child and being the victim of other crimes-like rape and spouse abuse-later in life. This could be because people who feel powerless have a difficult time asserting themselves and setting up boundaries.

And the cycle continues. Research shows that 75 percent of the people in treatment for sexual abuse report that their mothers were also sexually abused. A mother may involve herself in relationships with abusive men because that's what she thinks she deserves and it's familiar to her. In doing so, she exposes her children to abuse. Often the mother is so uncomfortable with her own victimization, she can't teach her children preventive tools like appropriate touch and assertion.

Betrayal
Victims often have a difficult time trusting authority figures or people of the same gender as the perpetrator. Even children too young to put their feelings into words have a sense of, "Someone who was supposed to take care of me and nurture me has betrayed me and used me for their purposes. Who can I trust?"

Another potential area for betrayal comes with disclosure. When the victim tells someone about the abuse, that person's response has the potential of being as traumatic for the victim as the abuse itself. For example, Brad visited his Uncle Fred and was molested. When Brad told his parents, they didn't believe him or take him seriously. Now his uncle and his parents have betrayed him.

Many mothers of incest victims don't take their daughters seriously or they ignore the disclosure. Some don't want to lose their husbands and financial security. Others don't want to deal with stigma in the community. Often the most difficult task of forgiveness for the victim is not with the perpetrator, but with the non-protecting parent(s) because of that sense of betrayal.

Healing the Victim
All these factors can cause isolation. A victim of sexual abuse believes:

• I'm powerless.
• I'm different from everyone else.
• I can't protect myself.
• People I'm supposed to be able to trust are going to betray me.
• Every relationship is sexualized.
• If people get close to me, they can't possibly like me.

Healing doesn't come easily.

The first step is to produce safety both in the home and treatment environment. This can mean removing the perpetrator from the home, having someone make sure the child is safe, or doing some problem-solving to avert further victimization.

In a therapy relationship, therapists don't use the victims in any way. The interaction is not sexualized. They can trust they won't be betrayed. They can be powerful. They don't have to feel ashamed. This is extremely helpful in the healing process.

Next, we must accurately identify the victim. Victims need to know that even if at times they were willing participants, the adult is always responsible. The adult was the offender; the child was the victim.

Particularly healing in this process with adults is to have them look at pictures of themselves when they were young. They can see how small and frail they were. An effective tool is to say to them, "Identify someone you know who's eight years old. If you heard that that person had been involved in sexual behavior with a 40-year-old man, whom would you blame?"

A factor that may hinder healing is that there may have been parts they liked. Maybe no one else was paying any attention to them. Perhaps some behaviors were physically enjoyable. Sometimes they received gifts. They feel ashamed to admit there were some pleasurable aspects.

The victims' relationship with Christ can be important at this stage of the healing process. They can relieve their shame and gain a sense of forgiveness by relinquishing their pain to Jesus. If victims are Christian, they can grasp a realization of that's why Jesus died. When he was on the cross, he was thinking of them and their pain.

Addressing stigmatization requires replacing the "damaged goods" syndrome. This can be visualized as, "When I look in the mirror, all I see is sex organs. That's me. There's nothing to me besides that."

To cover up the badness they feel inside, some victims overcompensate and try to be perfect. Some withdraw and set up barriers to prevent closeness. It's important for them to see themselves as more than just a victim of abuse. It's part of them and it's real, but there's more to them than that.

Next is to empower them to deal with their powerlessness. They must put words to what they feel and learn how to express their anger constructively. Some people use art, music, or journaling to express their feelings.

They learn to identify what they do have control over rather than focus on what they're powerless about. It's important they learn social skills, assertiveness skills, the different kinds of touch, and a Biblical sense of sexuality.

Victims must then release their entrapment through forgiveness. Forgiveness doesn't mean that what happened was OK. But if victims are caught in either outrage or helplessness toward the offender, then the abuser is still in charge. Forgiveness is a process. It's not something the victim does once and is done with. Ideally, it's healthy for the victim and the perpetrator to be in a safe environment so the victim can say, "You did this to me and it affected my life this way. I will never let you do that to me again. Only by the power of God can I forgive you. I want a relationship with you on my terms, and this is what it will be." (Maybe it's no relationship.) By making that statement, the victim has worked through some of the betrayal. She/he is not powerless, shamed, or sexualized.

The last stage is putting the abuse into perspective and using it as a position of strength. Victims can eventually say to their abuser and the world, "I used to feel this was all of me. But it's becoming less and less, and someday, this is going to be the tip of my finger."

Recovery from trauma occurs when victims are transformed into survivors. They integrate the catastrophe into their life history and use it as a source of strength. Some people do this by helping others through support groups. Some speak or write on abuse.

The key to preventing child sexual abuse is open communication and trust between parents and children. Teach the kinds of touch. Talk openly about sensitive issues. If children feel their parents will support them in other situations, they will trust them in this situation, too.

When a traumatic event is kept a secret, that secrecy typically magnifies the destructive power it already holds. Therapists, family members, and friends need to create environments in which people can safely disclose their secrets and be helped back toward wholeness.

Physical Indicators:

• frequent urinary tract infections
• urinary retention without evident physical cause
• rashes or itching of the genital area
• pain in the genital area from rips or abrasions
• symptoms of venereal disease or genital warts

Behavioral Indicators:

• depression, social withdrawal (child with few friends)
• drug/alcohol abuse
• running away (especially adolescents)
• suicide attempts (especially adolescents)
• more sexual knowledge than appropriate
• sexually precocious behavior
• loss of interest in activities they previously enjoyed
• asks not to be left alone with perpetrator
• sudden drop in grades or participation in school activities
• overly seductive
• repeated rape victim
• feelings of low self-worth
• negative body image-disgust, shame, excessive self-consciousness
• excessive masturbation
• increased anxieties, fears, phobias

Family Indicators:

• lack of strong coalition between parents or excessive collusion between them
• mother physically or psychologically absent, emotionally over-dependent
• father authoritarian, immature, self-centered, rationalizer, often victim of abuse himself
• mother passive, dependent, often victim of abuse herself
• incestuous model learned from childhood
• limited social contacts-child restricted from outside activities
• possibility of physical abusiveness prior to incest
• alcoholism often present in incestuous families
• mother withdraws from sexual role with spous

Teach Children the Different Kinds of Touches
One of the best tools you can use to protect children is to teach them the three kinds of touches. Tell them they don't have to be afraid of everyone, but there are some people who have a touching problem.

Good Touches

hugs, holding hands, back rubs, kisses, and high fives when you want them to happen

 

Bad Touches

pinches, hits, kicks, bites, and other touches that hurt

 

Secret Touches

when someone touches your private parts or asks you to touch theirs (Even good touches can be secret touches if they make you feel uncomfortable or if someone makes you do them when you don't want to.)

Tell your child how to respond to secret touches: "If this ever starts to happen, say 'no,' and come tell me right away. I'll make sure you're safe, and I won't blame you. You can always tell me."

You also may want to further explain special exceptions like a doctor's examination.