Child Sexual Abuse The Search for Healing Christopher Bagley And Kathleen King
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THE MEANING OF SEXUAL
ABUSE IN CHILDHOOD
My natural love for beauty was checked by some ancestral
dread. Yet this did not prevent me from feeling ecstasies and
raptures spontaneously and intensely without any shame or the
least sense of guilt, so long as they were disconnected with my
own body. I thus detect another element in the shame which I
had in being caught looking at myself in the glass in the hall. I
must have been ashamed or afraid of my own body. Another
memory, also of the hall, may help to explain this. There was a
slab outside the dining room door…G.D. lifted me onto this,
and as I sat there he began to explore my body. I can
remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going
firmly and steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped
that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand
approached my private parts. But it did not stop. I remember
resenting, disliking it—what is the word for so dumb and
mixed a feeling? It must have been strong, since I still recall it.
This seems to show that a feeling about certain parts of the
body; how they must not be touched; how it is wrong to allow
them to be touched; must be instinctive. It proves that Virginia
Stephen was not born on the 25th January 1882, but was born
many thousands of years ago; and had from the very first to
encounter instincts already acquired by thousands of
ancestresses in the past.
Virginia Woolf (1976)
Moments of being: autobiographical writings
This book is a search for the meaning of sexual abuse in
childhood, and an attempt to understand from a variety of clinical
and research studies how the wounds inflicted on children by the
1
crime of sexual abuse can be healed, and how such abuse can be
prevented. It will become clear to the reader that the available
evidence suggests that the sexual abuse of children is not only
disturbingly widespread but is also often harmful to the child
victims. Our work in this field began in the 1960s, arising from
an interest in sociological studies of the incest taboo and its
transgressions (Bagley 1969). At that time we assumed, along
with other researchers, that the interventions of a horrified society
could do as much psychological harm to an innocent child in an
incestuous relationship as could the sexual assault itself.
We were able at that time to begin a long-term follow-up study
with some of our subjects, and were able to survey the adult lives
of children who had been sexually abused within the context of
the family (some ten years earlier), in comparison with children
who had been removed from home because of physical abuse or
neglect (Bagley and MacDonald 1984). This study has convinced
us that sexual abuse itself (as opposed to any subsequent social
interventions) is indeed grossly intrusive in the lives of children
and is harmful to their normal psychological, emotional, and
sexual development in ways which no just or humane society can
tolerate.
The emotions and values of practitioners and researchers are of
fundamental importance in social action, writing, and research in
this most sensitive of areas. It behoves us, as potential experts in
this area, to make our own position clear. Neither of us was
abused in childhood, physically, emotionally, or sexually. Our
childhoods, one in rural England, the other in rural Canada, were
interesting, happy, and uneventful. We only came to an
understanding of the widespread occurrence of the sexual
exploitation of children, and the particular harm such abuse can
do, through our practice as researchers and social workers. Never
having experienced such abuse in a personal way, it was initially
difficult for us to understand or empathize with victims and their
emotional travail. In coming to terms with the reality of sexual
abuse, we found the personal accounts written by women
reviewing painful circumstances of abuse in childhood both
moving and intellectually helpful.
We commend to our readers these personal accounts. They are
stories of anguish, despair, courage, humour, hope, adventure,
forgiveness, and rebirth. It was these brave writers who began
publishing in the 1970s who first alerted the world to the real
nature of the problem of the sexual abuse of children. The early
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scholars—all women—deserve mention: Florence Rush, Judith
Herman, Karen Meiselman, and Diana Russell, were among these
intellectual pioneers. But it is above all to the non-clinical writers—
Charlotte Vale Allen, Katherine Brady, Louise Armstrong, and
others, including the women whose voices are recorded in the
collections edited by Elizabeth Ward, Ellen Bass, and Louise
Armstrong—who have changed our consciousness in the matter
of child sexual abuse.
This book attempts to offer an intellectual understanding of the
problem of child sexual abuse in many of its aspects. We
overview this literature from the professional standpoint of social
work, and from the value perspective of humanism. Our
humanism is not entirely of the secular variety, and has its roots
in the theology of the medieval schoolman, Duns the Scot, and in
writers and philosophers as seemingly diverse as John Donne, St
Vincent de Paul, the Quaker founders, William Blake, and Gerard
Manley Hopkins. The thread which joins these writers is the
joyful intuition that human beings have a spiritual essence which
is constantly bubbling to the surface of life. The burden of the
albatross is released through a simple act of grace. Though many
perils in this life tempt and betray us, escape from the hosts of
Gideon is ever possible. Everything that lives is holy, as William
Blake said. Even material things, even a poplar tree, trembles
with the essence of immanent beauty and goodness.
This intuition, this hypothesis about the conduct of living and
of interpersonal relationships is tempered by the sombre
realization that many humans fail to attend to the spirit within. It
is a further tenet of our philosophical belief that human beings
can be, must be, responsible for their own conduct and their own
redemption. As Vincent de Paul said, even the slave, or the man
in the deepest dungeon is responsible for his own sins, and his
own redemption. The man who sexually abuses children, we can
forgive, help and support: but he is always and ultimately
responsible for his own rehabilitation and must accept
responsibility for the harm he has imposed upon others.
Allied to these two principles—of innate goodness, and of
ultimate personal responsibility—is our fundamental notion about
the nature of children. They enter the world as pure, spiritual
beings and are the source of salvation for each new generation.
Denying or perverting the natural innocence and goodness of
childhood is an action of the most tragic order. The person who
abuses a child puts a millstone around his neck: but, in our
THE MEANING OF SEXUAL ABUSE IN CHILDHOOD 3
humanist philosophy, that millstone, like the albatross, can be
shed by an act of will, by an act of redemption.
PERSONAL ACCOUNTS 1978 TO 1987
Each personal account has certain unique features, and each
account has a different emphasis, a different tale to tell, a
different way of retrieving dignity and a sense of personal wellbeing.
Sometimes editors gather together accounts which are
consistent with their own experience and philosophy. Louise
Armstrong in 1978 edited A speak-out on incest which Susan
Brownmiller described in a review as ‘the first significant book
on incest ever to appear in print’. We cannot quarrel with such a
judgement: the sterile academic tomes published up to this time
did nothing to understand or alleviate the plight of victims of
child sexual abuse (sometimes described as incest when it takes
place within a family context). Indeed, 1978 was a significant
year for publications which guided our understanding of the real
nature and widespread occurrence of child sexual abuse (Bagley
1985).
A Speak-Out on Incest—Louise Armstrong, 1978
This edited book contains twenty-six contributions by women who
were sexually abused by a family member when they were
children. The personal accounts are brave, calm, and written
without self-pity. They are reflections of a mature understanding
by women who have surmounted this childhood confusion about
the way adults acted, and the nightmares and horror which the
imposed sexual relationship often involved.
One of the ironies of this book is that it is written by
psychological survivors—women who have been able to
surmount the traumas imposed by the sexual assault of childhood
and review this experience with constructive anger—without any
‘therapy’ from conventional helping professions.
I kept the memory of these experiences inside for the first
twenty years of my life. I prayed day and night that by the
time I was a teenager the memory would have gone from
me and I could finally have freedom through amnesia. But
once a teenager, I realized I would have to live with the
memory—it would never leave. I think I intuitively knew it
4 CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE
was not a natural experience that had happened to me. And
because such subjects were still in the closet in those days,
there was nothing for me to read in order to get
information. It was like invisible scars from a childhood
disease.
(Armstrong 1978:16)
Why is seduction and sexual assault in childhood so destructive
of normal development? One of the purposes of the present book
is to help the practitioner understand how and why the sexual
abuse of children so often causes psychological damage. As
Louise Armstrong says:
Rape by a stranger is quick and brutal. It allows for a
straightforward reaction—anger, hate. But the seduction or
coercion of a child by a needed and trusted parent is far
more complex. It is not amazing that some run away, that
some turn to drugs, that some, having been called slut by
their fathers, become promiscuous prostitutes. What is
amazing is that many (no-one knows how many) do not.
(Armstrong 1978:40)
The young victims coped in various ways—by passive
submission, by running from home, by identifying with the
sexual abuser, by a diffused or a focused hatred of self or others:
And then he would do cunnilingus. I remember just sitting
on the chair and watching his head between my legs, hating
him. The hate, the hate was a living thing. I remember
looking at his head and just wanting to take his hair and
pull it out. At six years old…. And he would say, ‘Look at
your mother. She’s had five children. What good is she to
me? It’s like sticking a sausage in a fireplace.’ And tell me
stories of how he had gone to bed with his sisters and their
best friends and what they did, everything in detail. How
did I cope? I compartmentalized it. I was able to son of put
it away. I remember lying there, crying, when I was very
small and saying to myself, ‘Some day I’m going to grow
up and some day I’m going to get away from here.’ And I
did. Starting at sixteen, I had three very early, very bad
marriages. Because I simply was not capable of adult
relationships, of a healthy relationship with a man…. I
THE MEANING OF SEXUAL ABUSE IN CHILDHOOD 5
would become completely frigid. I would begin to act out
all those angry things I had never been able to act out at the
time.
(Armstrong 1978:102–3)
This anguished account of both a childhood and early adulthood
destroyed by sexual abuse, illustrates a number of features which
have emerged in detailed studies of clinical populations. First of
all, the motivation of the offender is often based on his memory
of early experiences of sibling incest or of adolescent sexual
experiences. He seems to be acting out this fixated memory, or
seeks to recreate some of the circumstances of lost youth. This is
a theme which frequently occurs, for example, in the novels of
Vladimir Nabokov (Nabokov 1986).
A second clinical issue which this personal account illuminates
is that of learned helplessness and impotent rage which becomes
inner directed. This woman could only escape the sexual abuse
by fleeing into another abusive or exploitative relationship, which
became a series of relationships. What often happens is that a
woman takes her children into new relationships, and her new
partner may sexually exploit both her and her children.
Sometimes the woman is aware of this, but is too defeated to
intervene; often, however, she has no knowledge of the continued
cycle of abuse. She has little ego strength herself, and her
children have diminished or disrupted self-concept, because of
the changes or upsets in their own lives. Often the sexual abuse
of children takes place in such disrupted family circumstances.
But such abuse can also occur in seemingly normal families, in
which the father is a respectable professional, a religious man,
and a community leader.
Another of the accounts told to Louise Armstrong illustrates
the development of learned helplessness in a victim of childhood
sexual abuse:
And what these things did was they filled me with a deep,
deep depression and disgust. Yet, there was something
about my fantasies. It’s always him. His bald head. Going
down. You know? That association that I have—that I
enjoy on a level—that I can’t accept. Because then I
experienced nothing but wanting to die…. See, there were
two husbands. The two men in my life were both brutal.
The first was the most brutal. The second one, the father of
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my fourth child, was not brutal to the kids. He was brutal to
me…. Then I went with one other man because I still
couldn’t cope with kids. You wouldn’t believe. There was
no way of explaining my inability to cope. All they can do
is blame me and hate me today…. I just mentally blocked
everything out…. He only hit me twice. When he did, he
went like this—and broke my eardrum. Second time, he
went like this—and broke my nose. So I was in deathly fear
of him…. And I was passive. Because, again, in my
mother’s home, the mother, whether she agrees or
disagrees, must not disagree in front of the kids to her mate.
I want to kill. I have feelings of rage inside. But as soon as
it pertains to my own child, I go dead with feeling.
(Armstrong 1978:124–7)
This woman makes it further clear in her account that she was
unable to protect her son from sexual abuse, and that she had
herself sexually abused younger children when she was a
teenager. Later:
Then my first really close girl friend, about seven years
ago. She had a daughter. We lived together. We stayed
together two years. I was cruel to that child, like those men
had been to my kids…. I definitely got violent with her. I
had urges—I mean not urges—but thoughts crossed my
mind that I want to rip out her vagina, to destroy her. And I
thought to myself, maybe the reasons for wanting to destroy
a female body, a child female body, is because what my
stepfather did to me shouldn’t have happened. You
shouldn’t try to make an adult out of a little baby.
(Armstrong 1978:128)
This woman further describes how she came home one day to
find her boyfriend sexually molesting her 7-year-old child. She
accepted the situation passively:
I couldn’t even get angry. Instead I felt subjugated. The
same way with my stepfather. Like he had a right. But I
don’t feel logically that they have a right. But emotionally,
I’m completely in their control.
(Armstrong 1978:130)
THE MEANING OF SEXUAL ABUSE IN CHILDHOOD 7
It should be stressed that recent clinical studies (reviewed in a
later chapter) have shown that the large majority of mothers in
families where the sexual abuse of a child occurs had only vague
clues that something was going wrong in the family, but when the
daughter was able to reveal the abuse, the mother reacted with
shock and horror, and usually supported the child through the
crisis of revelation. The protection and support which mothers
can offer is well illustrated in a number of the case studies
included by Louise Armstrong.
Armstrong titles one of her case studies ‘The pillar of the
community’. This is written by David, who grew up in a
prosperous and seemingly respectable rural household. His family
were church-goers and engaged in voluntary social service. They
took in foster children. Some of these children, like David and his
sister, became victims of sexual abuse at the hands of David’s
father. David’s mother was quite unaware of the abuse, which
continued for many years.
It was one of the times when my mom was out of the house.
And my father had gone in to have intercourse with my
sister, which he hadn’t done before. He had done other
things. But he had never attempted full intercourse with her.
And she would not let him do that. And he got very angry
with her. Called her a whore and a slut and so on and so
forth. And I heard all this.
I was extremely angry. And the next thing I remember he
slammed off and went to the recreation room downstairs.
Sara was just hysterical and beside herself and went to the
bathroom and stayed there a long time. And then she came
out. She was crying and all, so I went in to her and talked to
her and she said she had gone to the medicine cabinet and
taken aspirins—a whole bottle. So I went down to my dad
and I started screaming at him and hollering at him. ‘Look
what you’ve done!’ And with that he got up and left the
house.
He just stormed out of the house. So I took it upon
myself to keep her on her feet and kept feeding her black
coffee. At this point she was ten. I was fourteen.
(Armstrong 1978:214)
After this incident, David finally told his mother about the abuse,
which had been continuing for six years:
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I described that it had happened when she was out of the
house, at class or at our P.T.A. or different times. ‘Well,
what did he do to you? And why didn’t you tell me?’ She
was really hurt. I repeated that he told us that she’d skin us
alive and that, you know—he’d said she would kill us and
all this. She said, ‘Do you really think I would have done
that?’ And I said no. ‘Well, why didn’t you tell me?’
You know, sort of double bind. But after I told she was
very protective. And—she lashed into him. She grew
hysterical. Started yelling and screaming at him and he sat
down and cried. And said he was really sorry. And that he
knew it was wrong. And he couldn’t help himself. But he
also threatened me at that point, too. He said that if he ever
got a hold of me, he was going to kill me. And I believed
him.
(Armstrong 1978:215–16)
