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 5 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.



Louise:

Narrator:
The violence that often accompanies the abuse is also unexpected of a woman. Victims often report excessive force equivalent to if not greater than that of a man. This was the experience in a Newcastle taxi a year ago of a 15 year old girl. Her 33 year old aunt held her down and forced her to submit to oral sex by the driver as payment in kind. Angered by that and other sexual attacks by her aunt Paula Belisle, the victim has decided to speak out publicly about the abuse.

Louise:
I was sitting watching the telly and I thought she was going into the toilet because she went out in the passage, She came back in and she had this chair leg cause it was on top of the electrical rad and then she just come over on the settee and put her hand over me mouth and pulling me pants down had her legs over my legs and she's got like big fat legs, you know what I mean, well really really tight on my legs and I couldn't move. She had a hand on me shoulder and a hand on me mouth and everything - just one hand though, and she was shoving the chair leg up us really really hard and I couldn't hardly scream because she had her hand over me mouth. It was very painful, it was like I was having a bairn [baby]. And I was just crying - I was really upset I didn't want me own aunty to do it to us. I thought men were animals, but women are just as bad - especially my own aunty doing that. I hate her. If I had the chance I'd kill her. I can't stand her.

Narrator:
Paula Belisle is now on probation. Louise says she has since threatened to kill her for going to the police.

Michelle Elliott:
Women are supposed to be the gentler sex, women are supposed to be incapable of cruelty in a sense, and I would like as a woman to believe that. Unfortunately my experience with the survivors tells me that many of their abusers have been very sadistic to them. Cruelty that is almost unimaginable South Wales

Narrator:
In the early hours of one morning in South Wales last year the authorities drew up in a quiet street to a neat looking terrace house, looking to arrest a male abuser. Nothing prepared them for what they found. Child Protection Officers were to stumble on a den of professional paedophiles, but a den in which the mother was the prime abuser.

Margaret Harris:(South Wales Probation)
It had all the appearances of a normal sort of terrace house from the outside, in a very ordinary community - a very proud community. And as you went in the front door it changed dramatically. The house was full of rubble and rubbish from floor to ceiling. The walls had been taken away right through to the point that you could see bare wires hanging down as though the house was still under construction. It gave the appearance of a house that was just designed really to completely disorientate the children. In the room where the family actually lived - that was where they videoing the children - they used two different cameras. The room where the computer was kept was full of rubbish and yet in this corner in a particular corner which had been sectioned off from the rest of the room was the most sophisticated equipment that you could imagine. There was a kitchen area where in the larder there were videos - pornographic videos. Hardly any food, just videos upon videos upon videos. We also then found under the floorboards home-made videos of the abuse of the children. They did what would almost be construed as a professional video, which we assumed would be for selling.

Narrator:
The husband had filmed the videos, but his wife did the abusing. She took a lead role, sometimes reading from scripts, acting out scenes. Most of them involved her daughter videoed between the ages of eight and thirteen.

Margaret Harris:
The older child was naked. Mother was naked. They strung up the older child and tied her, gagged her and string her up from a hook in the ceiling and beat her something like 100 times in about four minutes. They then laid her on the bed and further abused her. All the time mother was doing this, father was videoing the actual abuse. At the end of it all, at one point when the child was lying on the bed almost unconscious, mother and father sat on the edge of the bed and had a cup of tea together. I think that portrays very graphically the awful nature of this. To give it the name sexual abuse belies what actually happened in that house. It was torture. It was the most abhorrent torture I have ever seen.

Narrator:
The mother used the Internet to feed her fantasies. Links to the North of England and the United States were stark evidence of leading female involvement in the sort of network of abusers normally associated with men. The father was taken away and jailed for life. The mother got a lesser 15 year sentence. Without the exceptional video evidence the authorities say because she was a woman she may not have been implicated at all.

Margaret Harris:
Often when children are trying to tell us what's happening to them, we are dependent on their stories and I do wonder with this child, if we hadn't found the videos, and this child had simply told us what had happened it would have been beyond belief, and I do worry that no on would in fact have believed her. And I wonder therefore how many other children has this happened to, where they've either been too afraid to tell or if they have tried to tell they felt they weren't being believed and have held back. Because what we know we know from the videos. The children still haven't talked i n full about the horrors that they encountered.

Narrator:
Half the women in a recent survey of 50 convicted female sexual abusers said they derived sadistic pleasure from inflicting pain on victims. The research showed neither class nor age were barriers to their behaviour.

Jacqui Saradjiam:
In my research I've come across women of any age from young teenagers to grandmothers, from any class - from women who barely had a house to live in during their life to women with very large houses. And from any level of education - women who can barely read and write to women who've got degrees. We can't make assumptions about the type of woman who will sexually abuse a child.