What about when MOM is the abuser?

On Monday October 6, 1997 the BBC aired a show called The Sexual Abuse by Women of Children and Teenagers. I wanted to post complete transcripts of the show and this is part 3 of that. Be warned that some of the content can be disturbing and graphic.





Warning: This programme contains explicit descriptions of attacks and the emotional and physical damage they have caused, which some viewers may find distressing.



Chris:

Narrator:
Chris Roberts, seen here in the 1980's in a foster home, was removed from his own home because of physical abuse by his father. What the authorities didn't even consider at the time was that his mother might be sexually abusing him.

Chris:
There's no way you can describe how unpleasant it was. You couldn't put it into words. Imagine your worst nightmare come true; it probably doesn't even come close to it. The earliest memory would be when I was probably about two and a half or three years old. Beatings, physical and sexual abuse, mental abuse, from both my mother and father. My mother would keep us away from playschool and my other two brothers from school and use us for her sexual perversions whilst our father was at work. When I was three I remember I was put into a children's home.

Narrator:
But Chris's abuse was not to end there. On the weekly visits they were allowed to the home, his parents continued the abuse.

Chris:
The supervision order wasn't enforced. We'd be taken into a play room and our father would ram a chair up against the door and the abuse would carry on - on the property of the children's home.

Interviewer:
What sort of abuses happened in the home?

Chris:
At this point in time my mother had lost a set of twins ... can I stop for a minute please? [breaks down].

Narrator:
Chris was told he was to blame for the twins death. His feelings of guilt helped ensure he would submit to yet more abuse.

Chris:
There were many forms of abuse - physically, mentally and sexually. I had a mixture of mentally and sexually would be putting pornographic magazines into the children's home where we'd be made to sit and look at the magazines whilst performing sexual acts with our mother, and our father joining in as well.

Narrator:
Approximately one in every hundred girls in the population and one in every hundred boys in the population are sexually abused in their childhood by a woman. And that's a vast number of victims that we are avoiding if we are not looking at the issue of women as sexual abusers.

Victims trapped in the custody of their mothers as children, often only speak out after they've escaped. When they do, much of their testimony shatters the myth that women only sexually abuse if coerced by men.