Child sexual abuse: how to protect your child

When it comes to child sexual abuse, we involuntarily imagine ominous scenes involving a stranger who turns out to be a maniac and / or a pedophile, but in reality the most common scenario is different – this is sexual claims by an adult family member or family friend who is well known to the child. .

How to recognize trouble? And how to start a conversation with a child?

Child abuse can manifest itself in different ways. In such actions, the child can play a passive and active role and at the same time experience conflicting feelings: fear and pleasure, shame and desire. The paradox is that if the rapist manages to build a trusting relationship with the child, he may even experience pleasure.

Often the mother does not believe or does not want to believe the child when he tries to talk about what happened. Of course, it is difficult to admit and believe that such things can happen in your family. It’s easier to write it off as childish fantasies and fictions. However, children’s “fairy tales” may not be fantasies at all.

Alarms

You can find out about a case of violence or depraved actions against a child by family members, acquaintances or strangers by his appearance, behavior, conversations.

Never before observed abrasions and bruises on the face or on the body of a child who is not prone to fights and active games is an alarming signal. Especially if the child does not go into details or his story does not look entirely believable.

Experienced violence can provoke isolation, bad mood, depression, anxiety, fear, unwillingness to be alone with your offender.

A child can tell a friend or girlfriend, teacher, mother about what happened, but present it as an incident that happened to someone else, which he learned about from the news, read on the Internet or saw in the movies.

Pay attention to the emotional state of the child during the story, feel what he really wants to say by this: just share a shocking fact or signal something that happened to him personally.

In some cases, the child may perceive the actions of an adult as proper and correct behavior. The subjective reactions of children to sexual seduction are ambiguous: according to the results of the study, 52% of American students who experienced sexual seduction perceived it negatively, and 48% perceived it neutrally and positively.¹.

In addition, children are by no means always just passive objects of sexual harassment: a child with aroused sexuality can himself provoke and encourage an adult to erotic contacts. But as adults, we know that any act of a sexual nature against a child is criminalized. If an adult commits illegal acts, he is a criminal. The behavior of a responsible and loving adult should be aimed primarily at protecting the child.

Build a conversation the right way

If you have reason to suspect abuse against a child, but you do not feel confident and calm enough to talk with him about this topic, it is better to contact a professional psychologist.

If you still decide on a frank dialogue, think not only about what you will say, but also how. Posture, facial expressions, gestures, intonation, voice timbre, semantic pauses – the child reads all this as a signal: which side are you on? do you deserve his trust?

The beginning of the conversation and its scenario depend on the age of the child, family traditions and the degree of trust that exists between you. With a preschooler, you can play games with dolls, giving them the roles of a child and adult family members, among whom will be the person you suspect. Such game interaction allows the child to “lose” the adult’s negative actions, if they took place. You can invite your son (daughter) to draw his family and then, discussing what he has drawn, touch on relationships with a person who, according to your assumptions, could commit indecent acts against a child.

Direct questions that require an unequivocal answer are likely to confuse the child and force him to withdraw. Moreover, your assumptions may not be confirmed. It is important that the conversation does not resemble a situation of inquiry in court. Show sincere interest in the child’s life as a whole – talk about what makes him happy, upset, frightened, surprised, worried.

For an open conversation with a child of school age, there should be a friendly atmosphere. If the family has an experience of confidential conversations on other topics, then starting a conversation on such a delicate topic as alleged violence should be done with the usual phrases: “Let’s whisper”, “Do you want to tell me something?” But this is possible if a child knows from an early age that he can tell about everything, and you, an adult and loving person, are always ready to listen and help find a way out of any situation.

If such a trusting relationship with the child does not work out, try to start a conversation with a story that you have heard or read about the wrong behavior of an adult towards a child. Express your negative attitude towards the actions of an adult and understanding of the feelings and motives of the child’s behavior. Let your child know that he can always count on your support and protection.

Overcome the consequences

Single, and even more so repeated violence by a family member who forces the child to hush up these actions with threats or persuasion causes severe emotional trauma to the child. These grievances leave in his soul a feeling of guilt, dirt, impotence and betrayal.

The severity of the consequences of violence depends on the perception and age of the child. A preschool child who has experienced sexual affection from a loving relative may not show signs of psychological trauma. Sometimes her symptoms may appear much later, when he begins to understand what has been done to him.

Children who are aware of the horror, wrongness, and illegality of violent acts, but cannot resist them, often suffer from fears and nightmares, depressive states, self-flagellation, or uncontrollable outbursts of aggression directed at those who are weaker than them, or at animals.

Often they try to get rid of their feelings of helplessness and gain self-confidence through violence towards others. More often this happens with young men who, acutely experiencing their shame and feeling guilty, try to prove their masculinity by humiliating and showing violence.

Sometimes children and adolescents who experience violence from a stepfather or another family member with the silent connivance of their mother run away from home or attempt suicide. Most children who have experienced violence withdraw into themselves and do not develop close and trusting relationships with other people.

However, many of those who experienced childhood sexual abuse are able to “close” this page of their biography. They are helped by timely detection of trauma and assistance provided by a competent psychologist. But the most important thing is that next to the child there should be a close person whom he trusts and with the help of whom a sense of the value of his own personality will return to him.

¹ I. Kon “Seduction of children and sexual violence in an interdisciplinary perspective” // Children of Russia: violence and protection. Materials of the All-Russian scientific-practical conference. RIPKRO, 1997, p. 63-74.