The following excerpts are from an article in which a man talks about his experiences being sexually abused by his foster mother when he was a child (age 6):
It seems unthinkable, but ChildLine says calls from boys abused by women have doubled in a year. This deeply disturbing investigation reveals the terrible impact of a crime that society has never dared to confront.
Bill Jenkins's memories of the childhood abuse he suffered are as sharp as the pain that accompanies them.
He remembers the diamond pattern on the linoleum bathroom floor tiles, the Moby Dick mural on the wall, the door handle which seemed so high up next to his six-year-old frame.
What took place in the bathroom of that house in Sussex 50 years ago is shocking enough, but what makes it even harder to comprehend is that Bill's abuser was his foster mother - a woman entrusted with caring for him when his own parents couldn't.
'I was always frightened of her and what she forced me to endure affected the rest of my life, but as a society we have a mental block about female abusers. We are shocked when we see it happens. We can't believe that women are capable of such things.'
It is a sad day when these things happen and hopefully as more and more stories are made public more and more victims will feel it is safe and acceptable to come forward and speak up.
But the stereotypical belief that sex abuse is a male crime was shattered last week by an astonishing report from ChildLine which revealed that the number of children reporting sexual abuse by women has doubled over the past year.
The latest figures from the children's telephone helpline show a 132 per cent rise in complaints of female sexual assaults. Where the children specified the gender of their abuser, nearly a quarter of all calls involved women assailants and the majority of those involved the callers' own mothers.
For those interested you can view the posts I have made previously on mother/daughter sexual abuse and mother/son sexual abuse.
'Years ago, people were very shocked to hear that children were abused at all,' says child psychotherapist Diana Cant, who works with the victims of female sex abuse.
'The same is now true about female sex abuse. People can hardly bear to think about it or get their minds around it. We want to push it away. It flies in the face of the image of mothers as carers.
'It's important for people to realise that it does happen and, as we do that, it becomes easier for survivors to talk about it. Many children go through life believing they are the only people to whom this has happened. There's an enormous therapeutic benefit in realising that they are not alone.
'For it to be more publicly recognised is enormously important in helping people get help.'
Experts have known for years that women are just as able to abuse children as men are. Detective Chief Inspector Graham Hill, of the Child Exploitation And Online Protection Centre in London (CEOP), has interviewed several female sex abusers.
'There's this cultural perception of women as the home-makers, and that men are the sexually aggressive ones,' he explains. 'Society as a whole has bought into that and the law has been shaped around that. The reality is very different. But those attitudes are ingrained.
Years ago some people made comments along the lines of saying that child sexual abuse was so rare as to be 1 case in a million. We all now know how untrue that is. The same type of things have been said about people sexually abused by women. We are just now starting to prove how untrue that is also.
'When you start to talk about this subject, people tend to not want to know. They shut off because it's a subject they don't think is very common. They don't think it's something that warrants serious debate. As such, women tend to fly under the law enforcement radar.'
Yet DCI Hill insists 'ChildLine's findings are very much in line with our own'.
He adds: 'We come into contact with lots of female sex offenders and we know that there are a number of women who have a sexual interest in children and that they do sexually abuse children. The idea that's it's always a woman being coerced by a man is a myth.
When we can get people to change their perceptions and see abuse as a human issue rather than a gender issue we will begin to make much better progress.
Disturbingly, he adds: 'The majority of women we speak to will have abused their own children. Women tend to sexually abuse children who are close to them.'
This makes reporting such crimes even more difficult for child victims, who know that by doing so they may be kick-starting a process which will ultimate tear apart their family and, in all likelihood, see them being put into the care system.
'If you are being sexually abused by your mother, there's such a profound and primitive confusion,' says Diana Cant. 'It completely confuses sex and care-giving for both boys and girls.
'They stand to lose everything and they fear that, if they report it, everything they know, their family, will be taken away.
'And it's not just their lives, it's the lives of their siblings. There is also the issue that while one child may feel ready to disclose abuse, their brothers or sisters may not and may deny it, so there's guilt and confusion there.'
Some of the many reasons it is so under reported.
No doubt many will still struggle with the idea that women are capable of such despicable behaviour.
But until attitudes change it is also clear that female abusers will continue to hide behind the benign image of mother, aunt or family friend and that this tiny minority of wrongdoers will escape notice.
And the damage done to girls and boys will continue to go on with little to no help for the victims or their abusers. This last piece drives it home:
This is an extract from a letter written by Tony, an adult struggling to come to terms with the abuse he suffered at the hands of his aunt from the age of three.
'I know that the experts say that female sexual abuse is rare,' he writes. 'Don't believe it. There are many out there like me who were abused and who are now causing more abuse.
'I sometimes wonder how different my life might have been had my mother or someone else listened to the pain of a small boy. - Read the entire article here
Monday, December 7, 2009
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