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Child Sexual Abuse
by: Dr.Geoffrey Partington
Definitions
By definition abuse is a bad thing and abuse of the young is particularly loathsome. However, definitions of what constitutes abuse differ widely in all four types of abuse used in current typologies: child neglect, emotional abuse of children, physical abuse of children, and sexual abuse of children. Some definitions are very wide, such as those by Dorothy Gunn, when Director of the Child Abuse Prevention Service in Victoria that ‘any punishment that hurts a child is abuse’, and by Glenn Ford, when Deputy Superintendent of the Cobham Institute, that ‘any form of punishment that is belittling’ is abuse.
It would be absurd to try to enforce a single set of definitions on all who inquire into or discuss child abuse, but it is vital that all interested parties should understand precisely what each of them means by abuse. As it is, we not only have very inadequate information on which to base sensible public policies, but much of the available data is contaminated by lax and shifting definitions. Misapprehension as to what forms of activity are being characterised as abusive facilitates public misunderstanding about the incidence and distribution of abuse.
Definitions of child sexual abuse require particular scrutiny. Wendy Patton and Mary Mannison of the School of Learning and Development of Queensland University of Technology noted in 1996 that some surveys of child sexual abuse included ‘harassment (e.g. catcalls, whistling)’ within their totals of offences. Judith Cashmore and Kay Bussey of Macquarie University defined child sexual abuse as including ‘any sexual act directed towards a child, from intercourse to unwanted kissing or fondling clothed parts of the body’ and defined children as ‘all young persons under the age of 18.’ Babies and very small children find it difficult to object to ‘unwanted kissing’, perhaps by elderly hirsute relative, but such acts, if recalled by children in later years, were included by Cashmore and Bussey in their sexual abuse statistics. At the other end of the Cashmore and Bussey age range, all uninvited sexual advances by persons 18 or over to persons under 18 were classified by them as forms of child sexual abuse, including passes made by 18 year-old males at 17 year-old females. It is unlikely that many people who read about these purported statistics realised how lax was the definition of child sexual abuse.
Many purported statistics about child sexual abuse were derived from ‘phone-ins’, such as that organised in 1983 by the Adelaide Rape Crisis Centre. The organisers of that phone-in admitted that they accepted each and every claim made by phone as true and legitimate without investigation. Furthermore, the Centre’s definition of incest was ‘any explicit sexual behaviour that an adult imposes on a child under the age of 17’. The Centre, when pressed, admitted that ‘By strict legal definition, incest in South Australia is sexual intercourse between a parent and child or a brother and sister. South Australian law does not recognise other relationships as incestuous’. Indeed, it did not, nor did the law of any other Australian state, but numerous politicians and journalists accepted the grossly exaggerated figures derived from utterly unreliable ventures of this sort as reliable statistics for incest in South Australia. The Adelaide Rape Crisis Centre was given massive funding by the then ALP government to combat incest allegedly suffered by one female in every four.
Some academics, such as Di Vasto et al, James, Mims and Chang, and Sedley and Brooks, have tried to meet criticisms of failure to distinguish between more and less serious types of child sexual abuse by arguing that it is ‘inappropriate’ to try to erect an hierarchy of child abuse based on ‘seriousness’. Di Vasto et al asserted that non-invasive incidents, such as obscene phone-calls and exposure, are as stressful as invasive acts such as attempted rape and rape itself. Yet, even were the levels of stress similar, the public should be made aware of which kinds of sexual abuse are included in figures presented.
Given laxity and variation in definition, it is hardly surprising that there are considerable discrepancies in estimates of the extent of child sexual abuse. Estimates offered for females who have experienced unwanted sexual advances during childhood range for the United States from 10 per cent of the total relevant population (Finkelhor, 1979), through 16 per cent (Russell, 1983) and 21 per cent (Wyatt, 1983), to 62 per cent (Wurtele and Miller-Perrin, 1992). In 1985 Miriam Saphira claimed that ‘almost half the girls’ in New Zealand had been sexually abused. In Australia Goldman and Goldman made an estimate of 28 per cent in 1988. Even wider ranges are found in estimates of sexual abuse of males under 17, from 3 per cent to Kolto’s 31 per cent.
Further confusion arises from failure to distinguish between distributions of children abused and child abusers: child sex abusers within families usually abuse one or two children, whereas abusers outside families typically abuse about 70 children before being apprehended. Abel et al. reported in 1987 that the 561 self-reported non-incarcerated sex offenders they interviewed finally admitted to 291 737 previously undisclosed acts against 195 407 victims. These figures represented 520 offences, or 348 per offender victims on average over and above the number to which they had confessed during trial. Suzanne Jenkins, Senior Therapist at the Gracewell Clinic in Birmingham, investigated in 1991 the sexual crimes of 29 men in the clinic’s rehabilitation programme. The 29 had been convicted of 271 offences against 178 victims, but in discussion they admitted to 14 971 acts of sexual abuse against 1 082 victims. Richard Read Q.C. told the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs into the Crimes (Child Sex Tourism) Amendment Bill (1994) that Bill Allen boasted of having sexually molested hundreds of boys. The National Crime Authority Inquiry of 1995 noted that a child molester from Queensland, Clarence Osborne, claimed to have sexually abused about 2 500 boys, not one of whom reported him to the police or any other authority. Even allowing for criminal boasting, these non-familial habitual abusers had far more victims on average than have typical intrafamilial offenders. Yet, whether deliberately or not, the incidence of extra-family as against intra-family child sexual abuse in Australia seems to have been seriously underrepresented in the Australian research carried out during the 1980s and 1990s
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Australian surveys
Given widespread concern about child sexual abuse for over a quarter of a century, reliable research on its incidence and distribution is surprisingly limited. The three most ambitious inquiries appear to be those by Ronald J. Goldman and Juliette D. G. Goldman in 1988, by Juliette Goldman and Usha K. Padayachi in 2000, and by W. Patton and M. Mannison in 1996. All three were based on questionnaires administered to university students.
Goldman and Goldman had responses from 603 female and 388 male students. 28 per cent of the females and 9 per cent of the males claimed to have been sexually abused when below the age of 18 by adults aged 18 and over. Of the 188 sexually abused females, 16 reported unwelcome ‘invitations’ to sexual activity (these presumably went no further than invitation), 16 ‘hugging in a sexual way’, 30 ‘showing genitals’, 40 ‘fondling sexually’, 44 ‘touching genitals’, 18 ‘simulated intercourse’ and 10 ‘intercourse’. Goldman and Goldman reported that alleged intrafamilial sexual abusers were distributed as follows: Father/Stepfather 13, mother 1, brother 76, sister 19, uncle 21, grandfather 8, male cousin 66 and female cousin 13. Abuses and abusers were not connected to each other by the researchers, so that there may have been no cases of intercourse between females under 18 and their fathers or stepfathers (between whom Goldman and Goldman made no distinction.
Juliette D. G. Goldman and Usha K. Padayachi reported on a similar questionnaire in 2000 answered by 427 university students in the University of Queensland. Goldman and Padayachi defined a child as a person under the age of 17 instead of 18. Child sexual abuse was again defined as ‘unwanted contact or non-contact sexual experience perpetrated on a child. Contact sexual abuse was defined to include ‘kissing, hugging or fondling a child’s breasts or genitals, and/or simulated intercourse, and penetration of the vagina, anus, or mouth with a penis, finger or an object’, although fingers in mouths were no doubt excluded. Non-contact sexual abuse was defined to include ‘exhibitionism, taking picture of the child in the nude or engaging in sexual experience in the presence of the child’. Goldman and Padayachi defined incestuous abuse to include ‘any unwanted contact or non-contact experience which is perpetrated on a child by a relative who is related to the child either by marriage or blood’. Goldman and Padayachi claimed that 128 (45 per cent) of 287 females and 26 (19 per cent) of the 140 males sampled stated they had been sexually abused as children. The alleged sexual abusers were broken down as follows: ‘relative’ 54, ‘someone in authority’ 8, ‘stranger’ 22, ‘family friend’ 39, and ‘friend of victim’ 33. However, as well as giving 54 as the number of female victims of ‘incestuous sexual abuse’, that is 34.6 per cent of the total of ‘sexual-abuse experiences’ and 18.8 per cent of the total sample of 287 females, Goldman and Padayachi provided a table which ‘shows that about 54 per cent of the males and 47 per cent of the female victims reported at least one experience of incestuous abuse before the age of 17’. The reason for the discrepancy between the 34.6 and ‘about 47’ percentages is not clear.
The ‘incestuous’ perpetrators of females were listed as follows (they add up to above 54 because some females claimed to have been incestuously abused by more than one relative): 19 fathers, 7 stepfathers, 5 mothers, 2 stepmothers, 6 grandfathers, 8 brothers (step and biological combined), 3 sisters (step and biological combined), 15 uncles, one aunt, 7 cousins and 2 other relatives. If both Sydney and Queensland university students were reliable in these questionnaires, then cousins in Queensland are much less interested in each other sexually than in New South Wales, but Queensland fathers are a much greater danger to their daughters. However, as in the earlier Goldman and Goldman report, we are not informed about levels of sexual abuse committed by different family relations. The researchers must have all those figures available, since they broke down abusive experiences into five categories: 1: took nude photographs of the child; exposed sexual organs to the child, and engaged in sexual activity in the child’s presence, 2: kissed the child in a sexual way, hugged the child in a sexual way, and touched or fondled the child’s breasts or genitals; 3: made the child touch or fondle their (perpetrator’s) breasts and/or genitals; 4: attempted to insert a penis in the child’s vagina and/or anus; 5: Inserted a penis in the child’s vagina or anus, inserted something else (finger or object) in the child’s vagina and/or anus..
In 1996 Patton and Mannison surveyed 253 female and 92 social science students in an unnamed university in an Australian capital city. The research claims to have discovered the following high levels of ‘unwanted sexual experience as a child (to age 13)’:
Being followed 32.6 18.2
Being flashed at 23.6 2.3
Request to do something sexual 20.9 10.3
Being kissed or hugged in a
sexual way 20.4 10.3
Being shown sexual parts 27.4 13.8
Being fondled in a sexual way 19.2 3.5
Being touched in sexual areas 22.4 4.7
Intercourse 1.7 1.2
There is no explanation of how following for non-sexual purposes, such as robbery, was separated from sexual pursuit. It is not clear whether the one boy in the intercourse category engaged in anal or vaginal intercourse. More worrying is the very weak representation of extra-family sexual abuse in the results.
All three studies may also seriously underestimate the wrongful sexual acts committed by young children, below the age deemed necessary for criminal responsibility. Freda Briggs reported in 1986 that three South Australian twelve year old boys had anally raped seven and eight year olds over a twelve month period in the toilets of a government primary school before detection. In a ghastly tale of continuity, two eight year old boy twins who had been among the abused in the school toilets sexually abused their two year old sister four months later by inserting instruments in her anus and vagina. They used a tape-recorder to record her screams. These three studies may also, because of specific characteristics of university students compared with the population at large, have indicated a higher proportion of females rather than males sexually abused, and in consequence a higher proportion of intrafamilial rather than extrafamilial abuse.
Other interesting questions arise from these questionnaires. Are all children in nudist families victims of incestuous child abuse? If so, why are the nudist parents not prosecuted and why are mass media portrayals of nudity so widely available? Are all Indigenous Australian children, and many non-Indigenous as well, who see their parents or other relatives engage in sexual intercourse victims of incest? ? If so, why are the Indigenous adults not prosecuted?
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False accusations
Anonymous questionnaires cannot be the basis for false accusations of individuals, although they may be used to project hatred of groups, but suspicions of vast scare mongering about child sexual abuse are aroused by the sharp contrasts between prosecutions and incidence of conviction. In the United States, for example, 150 000 children were reported in 1963 to the authorities as victims of child abuse and 1.7 million in 1985, but in the latter year 80 per cent of all cases were dropped for lack of evidence and never reached court. Many techniques, such as exposure of children to ‘anatomically correct’ dolls and the ‘anal dilation’ test, praised earlier by ‘experts’ as incontrovertible evidence of child sexual abuse, proved to be misleading in case after case. The ‘child abuse accommodation syndrome’, by which children who denied having been abused were declared to be just as likely to have been abused as those who claimed to have been victims, was also discredited after its use had been critical in gaining some convictions. Richard Wexler concluded that 60 per cent of abuse notifications in the jurisdictions he studied were entirely false. As well as mistaken inferences of child sexual abuse made by teachers and others, there were many instances of false accusations made by estranged former spouses and ‘partners’ against each other, mainly made by females. Children and young people frequently made false accusations as well, sometimes on their own initiative and sometimes at the instigation of a revenge-seeking parent.
By the end of the 1980s it was clear that many campaigns against sexual abuse had wrongly broken up a large number of families. Adelaide had played its part in this. Dr Marietta Higgs, a graduate of the University of Adelaide, diagnosed in 1987, within five months of her appointment as a medical officer in Cleveland in the North of England, 121 children as victims of child sexual abuse, compared with an annual average of ten before her arrival in Cleveland. All the children were taken away from their families – a real case of a ‘stolen generation’. Enormous damage was done, as Lord Justice Butler-Sloss noted with regret when she presided over an official inquiry into the Cleveland witch hunt. After the Butler-Sloss inquiry, zealotry diminished in Britain and greater care was taken before families were accused of child sexual abuse. Yet, despite the evidence that large numbers of false claims of sexual abuse have been made over the years by males and females, by young and old, some activists and professionals employed in the field worry only about possible failure to notify authorities when abuse actually takes place. Chris Goddard, a regular contributor to Children Australia since the early 1990s, accused the ‘services’ of being ‘concerned with protecting the perpetrator rather than protecting the child’. Among ‘services’ condemned by Goddard are the Departments of Health and Community Service and the Directorate of School Education in Victoria in the mid-1990s. He accused them of ‘apparent lack of empathy by administration and staff with the suffering of the victim and the parents and the inadequacy of counseling for victims’ The evidence for these failings seems to have been that these Departments did not always assume immediately that accusations of abuse were correct and that they sometimes assumed that teachers and others were innocent until proved guilty.
In England, I was for several years Secretary of one of the largest union branches of the National Union of Teachers, then a teacher educator, a headmaster and an Education Officer of a Greater London Local Educational Authority. In each of these capacities I came across accusations of sexual abuse made by school students against teachers and student teachers. Some of the accusations were, alas, true; others were, alas, false. There were, of course, predatory teachers who deserved to be identified and to receive appropriate punishment, but it was not uncommon ploy for girls just under the school-leaving age to ‘try it on’ with new young male teachers, including student-teachers, some of whom were vain enough to imagine that it just their manly charms that the girls found irresistible. Some young male teachers found themselves subject to quasi-blackmail: if they did not act in conformity to the girls’ wishes, they were threatened with accusations of making sexual advances to them. In other words, just as any sane person would expect, sexual initiatives could come from adolescent pupils or from young teachers. It became necessary to warn teachers, especially young men, against remaining in a room alone with a female pupil, and latterly the advice extended to being alone with a male pupil as well. There has been a steady increase in the number of cases in which adolescent boys have been seduced by or have themselves seduced young women teachers, but most cases still arise between female students and male teachers.
Of course, there is in no way equivalence of responsibility between teacher and students, or between priest and child. The young are, or should be, in statu pupillari, and the teachers and priests are, or should be, in loco parentis. Even one case of child abuse is one too many and children deserve our every protection, whether in the home, the school or the church. Nonetheless, accusations against teacher, clergy, child care workers and others who interact with children ought not to be accepted at face value without proper inquiry, any more than accusations of rape or other sexual misconduct should be assumed to be accurate without evidence. Not every accusation is a true one, and new zealots should not be able to constitute themselves as judge and jury. The zealotry of the 1980s wrecked many homes in which no child abuse took place.
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The anti-clerical thrust
Although in 2002 anti-family animus has by no means disappeared from publications in Australia about child sexual abuse, there has been a marked change of target from families to churches and church schools. As recently as 1996 Patton and Mannison listed as perpetrators of sexual abuse against females, ‘fathers, uncles, family friends, through to boyfriends and relationship partners’, but made no mention of strangers or of teachers, child-carers or clergy. The current tendency to concentrate on the clergy and related professions in child sex abuse allegations is widespread in the western world and originated in the United States. However, it may be especially intensive in Australia because John Howard nominated a leading cleric as Governor-General of Australia and because the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Sydney is identified as a foe by many radical groups.
There is, of course, no doubt that professions and voluntary activities that facilitate frequent and close contact with children and young people are of particular attraction to paedophiles and pederasts, or that clergy and voluntary church workers include such people among their number. Lanning terms people who enter these professions and activities in order to molest children ‘preferential child molesters’. In Lanning’s typology, ‘situational child molesters’, mainly intrafamilial, find that they are in a position domestically to commit child abuse and do so, but typically as only one among other sexual activities. In contrast, ‘preferential’ molesters strongly prefer sexual use of children to any other sexual activities and often seek employment and/or influence in places where large numbers of potential victims are available. Furthermore, male intrafamilial situational molesters generally target girls, but preferential molesters typically target boys.
It is, of course, just as important to protect children and young people from sexual abuse outside the home as in it. It may be that even more stringent punishment is appropriate for ‘preferential molesters’ who deliberately seek access to the children than for intrafamilial offenders. What is worrying is that the same absence of clear definition of sexual abuse is now rife in anti-clerical campaigns as in the 1980s anti-family ones. In addition, acceptance of claims of sexual abuse as proof that it has actually taken place seems little different from the worst days of the Cleveland scandals. There also seems to be ideological bias in 2002 in the concentration on clergy and church school teachers as targets of accusation, as compared with teachers in secular schools and workers in child care centres. Boarding schools and residential institutions may well offer greater attraction than day schools to paedophiles but, as Briggs and Hawkins noted in 1997, not only do paedophiles and pederasts often gain entry into professions and services giving access to children, but some have actually bought or opened child care centres in order to maximize opportunity for molestation. One might wonder, too, why the outcry against the abuse of children in government institutions, such as that brought to light in the 1999 Forde Commission of Inquiry into the Abuse of Children in Queensland Institutions, was so muted as compared with abuses in institutions connected with Christian churches.
Teachers in state schools are very little less vulnerable to unfounded accusations than are clergy or teachers in church schools. The main difference is that state school teachers have not been targeted ideologically in recent years by campaigning organisations. Their vulnerability was illustrated at the start of the 2002 school year in Aspley High School, Brisbane, when both the male principal and the female deputy principal were alleged by widely circulated e-mails to be under official investigation for child sexual abuse. There was and is now no evidence whatsoever that either of them had the slightest connection with any such offences, but their employer, Education Queensland, passed the case over to the Crime and Misconduct Commission. The principal and deputy principal were advised to take stress leave. Had they not followed that advice, they might well have been suspended. They remained on stress leave in August 2002.
Activists such as Hetty Johnston, president of Bravehearts and a leading persecutor of the Governor-General and Archbishop Pell, claim that false accusations by children against teachers or parents are very rare, because most children do not make such accusations. Most children do not, but about the same proportion of children as of adults do lie, as any serious participant in public discussion on the matter would know full well. As it is, more teachers make false accusations than are victims of them. Many feel forced into this position because of current employment regulations, such as those imposed by the South Australian Department of Human Services.
The SA Department notes in its instructions to teachers, medical persons, social workers, police and others, who are all ‘mandated notifiers’ that ‘in recent years the number of reported suspicions of child abuse and neglect in South Australia has increased markedly in line with national and international trends’. It fails to note that there has been no corresponding increase in the number of convictions. Failure to notify is an offence under he Children’s Protection Act 1993 and carries a maximum penalty of a $2500 fine. ‘All reasonable suspicions must be reported without delay’. Notifiers ‘do not have to be able to prove that the abuse has occurred’ and are ‘immune from civil liability for reporting’ suspicion in good faith. Abuse may be inferred in good faith if it is suspected that ‘the child/young person’ has had ‘their self-esteem and social competence undermined or eroded over time’. There may be something to be said for these provisions, but fears that new abuses may be in process of creation arise when potential notifiers are told they must tell ‘the child/young person you believe him or her’, irrespective of what the accusation may be, and must be told that ‘it is not their fault and he or she is not responsible for the abuse’. A child is defined under these regulations as a person under eighteen years of age’. It is hardly surprising that, once weapons to use in family quarrels have been placed in students’ hands, some will use them against teachers and other adults outside the family as well as parents and siblings. Little thought seems to have been given to protecting families and teachers from malicious accusations. The protection of children should be uppermost, but ought to be combined with other legitimate concerns.
Questions should be raised about the reduction of the age of consent to sexual intercourse in several states of Australia since the Wood Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Force released its final Report in 1997. How can we reconcile legitimate concern with child sexual abuse with increasing the vulnerability of young Australians to sexual predators? Selective indignation does no credit to any of us. Given the close association between pedophilia and other extreme forms of child sexual abuse with availability of pornographic magazines and films, it seems odd that child protection agencies are not more active in opposing easier dissemination of such material. Furthermore, it is very rare that any defence of consent can be made in respect of pornographic representation of children of the type advanced in adult pornography. Decisions must be made as to whether uniform definitions of sexual abuse will be employed.
In Australia there is at present considerable legal toleration of acts committed during initiation rituals of Indigenous youths that would incur legal action if carried out in suburbia. Some ‘multiculturalists’ demand protection for female circumcision as practised by some immigrant groups, whereas acts far less painful are usually ranked among the more severe forms of child sexual abuse of females in mainstream Australia. There are many other examples of this character that require careful attention.
The zealotry of today must not be allowed to wreck schools and churches by generalized slurs against entire categories of persons, most of are exemplary in their dedication to the true interests of children and young people. In the course of the many inquiries likely to be made into the incidence of child sexual abuse over the next few months, it is important to establish the definitions of abuse and the conditions under which material is gathered. If proper precautions are not made, we shall once again see bad situations made even worse.
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