Our magazines and TV screens are becoming very crowded indeed with child abuse. Believe the touted statistics and there is no patch of populated earth not crawling with paedophiles and their damaged targets. Believe the tabloids and glossy magazines and anyone who reveals themselves as a victim of child abuse is unquestionably “brave”, their tales of suffering and survival performing a selfless service for the community. Believe the campaigners and false allegations are “rare” - so unlikely, in fact, that accusers should be rewarded with cash and positions of public influence before their juries have even been sworn. Forgive me, but I don’t believe any of it. 

The widely disseminated ‘fact’ is that 1-in-5 of us (1-in-4 girls, 1-in-6 boys) are victims of childhood sexual assault. It’s a terrifying statistic, no doubt about it. But before you go dunking yourself under hypnosis and pointing your finger at your father’s pants, it’s important that you know where these figures come from.

According to the Australian Centre for the Study of Sexual Assault:

Information on prevalence of childhood sexual assault and the relationship of the perpetrator to the child comes largely from national population surveys...probably the most accurate source of information on prevalence of childhood sexual assault.

In other words, the ‘facts’ on child abuse prevalence come not from records of the courts, or police files, or even documented cases from the health sector - all of which would reveal statistics but a fraction of the popular 1-in-5 (one study in Britain, based upon data gathered from 1599 family doctors, police surgeons, paediatricians and child psychiatrists, estimated an incidence of child sexual assault of about one child in every 6000) - but from the testimonies of people filling out forms and answering questions on the telephone. That I do not have reliable statistics at hand to unequivocally state that 1-in-3 people are liars – who will lie about anything, to anyone, if it means they can talk for a little longer – decrees that I can only responsibly report my suspicion that it is so. Evidently, those who take the results of questionaires and telephone surveys and parade them as fact are not so cynical or cautious. As Juliette D. G. Goldman and Usha K. Padayachi diplomatically wrote in the Journal of Sex Research in November 2000: “There is always a question of whether what is being reported is, in fact, what happened.”

One could ask oneself what sort of person might be disposed to spending time engaged by such a survey: one for whom child sexual assault was not an area of particular concern, or one who had a deep personal interest in the issue? It is inevitable that the decision of the former makes much less of an impression on studies than that of the latter. Would a 15-minute phone survey - such as the International Violence Against Women Survey of 1994 - have a greater chance of attracting the attention of grounded individuals with good relationships and busy lives to lead, or those with a little too much time on their hands and a couple of axes to grind - attention-seeking types who are only too keen to answer questions in the ‘right way’ if it’s going to keep them involved? Testimony is the arch enemy of absolute truth, and the confounder of empirical science.

There is a phenomenon that doesn’t show up in statistics, or appear as a disclosure in the footnotes of testimony-based studies. In fact, due to the depth of the human soul and the impotence of science when it comes to mining it, there is no hard “evidence” of it at all, and yet most people know it to exist, because it is a human characteristic as prevalent as vanity or lust. It is the phenomenon of the woman (or man) who hits her 30s or 40s or 50s and begins to ask herself who she is and what it’s all been about. She looks back on the dreams that never came true, the failed relationships and friends estranged, the lies she told, the people let down, the money never made, the mistakes, the shame. And she begins to wonder what made her like she is, what caused all this, who wrote the script. Could it be that she’s just a bad seed, a failure? Or might there be something else, a single event, that cast the die long before she had a chance? Maybe all this wreckage is not really her fault after all…

Testament to this phenomenon can be found, in fact, in the statistics presented on the Bravehearts website, which refer to a 1988 study during which convicted child sex offenders were asked to write a detailed sexual history, including information on whether they were abused as children. However, when a polygraph was introduced as part of this study, “reports of childhood victimisation dropped from 67% to just 29%. (Hindman, 1988)”. A telling study indeed, unless you really do believe that only paedophiles tell lies.

More mercurial than the trustworthiness of the respondents to population surveys is the wide-ranging definition of what constitutes sexual assault. For the purposes of the International Violence Against Women Survey of 1994, sexual assault constituted “inappropriate touching”, but many surveys set the bar a good deal lower than that. As Geoffrey Partington wrote in Quadrant in 2002:

In four separate studies in the 1980s, Di Vasto et al, James, Mims and Chang, and Sedley and Brooks, tried to meet criticisms of failure to distinguish between more and less serious types of child sexual abuse by arguing that it is “inappropriate” to try to erect a hierarchy of child abuse based on “seriousness”. Di Vasto et al asserted that non-invasive incidents, such as obscene phone calls and exposure, are as stressful as rape.

In her autobiography, In The Best Interests of the Child, Hetty Johnston, founder of Bravehearts and unquestionably Australia’s most prominent voice on child sexual assault, documents three childhood incidents that, as far as she is concerned, place her within the realm of the abused: the first sees Hetty and her sisters returning from the beach one day when “a man stepped out of a public toilet that happened to be situated in a park on our route and dropped his towel to reveal his nakedness”; the second takes place at the beach also, when an argument with an unknown adult results in the man slapping young Hetty in the face “so hard that I could only see stars for about five minutes”; and the third involves a man at an indoor pool who, while playfully throwing children in the pool, places “a hand in my crutch as he thrust me skyward.

“For me,” Hetty writes, “these occurrences have not left any indelible imprint but they do raise an interesting point. Statistically speaking, I had become the ‘one in four’ girls who had been sexually assaulted before the age of eighteen. But these were statistics I was to discover later in life. Right now, I was just a kid trying to negotiate the adult world. No big deal really.”

This passage is striking. Not only does it reveal to us the relatively commonplace occurrences that pass for “child sexual assault” in the minds of today’s crusaders, but it exposes them as incidents that, as unsavoury as they may be, are almost rites of passage for children of the modern world, blown off as “no big deal” by Hetty Johnston herself, one of the hottest, angriest winds in the current storm of hysteria. Could all this fear and counter-fear be about something which, for the most part, is nothing to get excited about?

Susan Clancy thinks so. A former Harvard psychologist and the current research director Center for Women’s Advancement, Development and Leadership in Nicaragua, Clancy believes that it is often not the childhood sexual assault itself but the adulthood expectation of post-traumatic syndromes, thrust upon victims by an over-zealous recovery industry, that does the most damage - a controversial theory put forward in her book, The Trauma Myth.

“The title refers to the fact that although sexual abuse is usually portrayed by professionals and the media as a traumatic experience for the victims when it happens - meaning frightening, overwhelming, painful - it rarely is,” Clancy told Salon.com earlier this year. “Most victims do not understand they are being victimized, because they are too young to understand sex, the perpetrators are almost always people they know and trust, and violence or penetration rarely occurs. “Confusion” is the most frequently reported word when victims are asked to describe what the experience was like. Confusion is a far cry from trauma.”

Which is not to say that real victims do not feel real pain. But it confirms something that many of us, I’m sure, have always believed about moral panic, and its ability to hurt the very people it purports to protect (never mind its ability to destroy the innocent, ie: those who are yet to be proven guilty). 

And then there is the matter of celebrities, politicians and other such folk and their public revelations regarding the abuse they suffered as children. Setting aside the cynicism that suggests such declarations might be more therapeutic for careers than anything else, one is moved to ask exactly how the community benefits from these “brave” exhibitions. The common wisdom says that other victims might be “empowered” to come forward and seek help, and, if so, that’s surely a good thing. But, to be frank, the class of people that is moved to action by the exhibitions of a celebrity is surely comprised of some of society’s more desperate and immature individuals. It stands to reason that the celebrity not only “empowers” genuine victims, but insincere copycats and well, who spy some kudos and sympathy - perhaps even cash - to be earned from their own ‘revelation’. The removal of stigma from child abuse victims is a noble pursuit, but we should be careful not to transform child abuse into some kind of chic, a history of childhood sexual assault becoming a badge of honour for the young and impressionable.

I can’t imagine how confusing and frightening it must be for children today, aware as some must be of the ‘fact’ that they have a 1-in-5 chance of being sexually molested, most probably by a member of their own family. And here is where the excesses of the crusade against child abuse become not just over-zealous and silly, but irresponsible, even abusive. Most of us didn’t have to grow under the shadow of imminent, omnipresent paedophilia - the dirty man at the pool was little more than a creepy amusement to be avoided. Today, he and others of his ilk are being used to bulk up statistics on serious child sexual abuse, our children now convinced there is no escape, that their doom is awaiting them in the shadows of their own homes. It’s despicable. No child should have to be frightened of that.

It’s a pity those who implore us to “for God’s sake” think of the children don’t themselves, in fact, think of the children, for God’s sake.

http://blogs.news.com.au/jackmarxlive/index.php/news/comments/the_abuse_of_child_abuse/

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