Can we explain why sexual abuse happens?

Home: Family & Friends: About Child Abuse: Why does it happen?

This article is written for women and assumes a male offender, however SECASA acknowledges that both men and women can be survivors of sexual abuse and that offenders can be male and female.

This information has been reproduced with the kind permission of the Department of Human Services Victoria. Many of the DHS booklets on this site are no longer available in printed format, but all inquiries should be directed to the Protection and Care Publishing Unit, Department of Human Services Melbourne (03) 9616 7013.

The below sections are extracted from the booklet You and Your Child.

Department of Human Services. (2002).
You and your child - for parents of children who have been sexually abused.
Melbourne, Victoria: Community Care Division.

While we are learning more about child sexual abuse, it is difficult to give reasons why it occurs. So rather than try to explain why child sexual abuse occurs, we can describe various beliefs that are held about child sexual abuse.

Over the years, our understanding of child sexual abuse has changed. In the past, some people believed that the child or the mother was most responsible for the abuse. Many people believed that children led men on or mothers set their children up to be abused by men. However, as we are learning more about child sexual abuse, we have changed our ideas about responsibility and blame for the abuse. We can look at the following areas to gain a greater understanding.

Society

Any understanding of child sexual abuse needs to take into account the society in which we live. Understanding the way men and women interact is very important in understanding child sexual abuse. Many counsellors and researchers now look at child sexual abuse from the point of view that men have more power in our society than women. Women are often economically dependent on men - they may rely on their male partners for money for their day-to-day living. Some say that men have a need to control women and that behaviour such as rape, domestic violence and child sexual abuse all stem from a man's need to control. However as women often are seen as protectors and carers of children, when children are harmed within a family many people blame the mother for that harm - no matter what actually happened. Again, remember that it is always the abuser who must take responsibility for the abuse.

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Secrecy

Child sexual abuse is a private act. Usually there are no witnesses. The abuser will make all sorts of statements to the child to stop them from telling anyone about the abuse. The abuser will also use threats to keep the child silent. For example, to a very young child, the abuser may say that what is happening is their own very special secret. To older children the abuser may say to the child that if they tell they will be sent away to a home or that their mummy will die. To teenage children the abuser may say that they are preparing them for marriage or just teaching them about sex. Some men never make threats but know that the child would find it very hard to tell anyone about what is happening.

In these ways the abuser is clever and very careful to make sure that the sexual abuse will stay a secret. The implication of this is that the abuser realises that what he is doing is wrong and does not want the abuse to come out in the open.

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Relationships

The abuser relies on the child not telling the secret. A strong relationship between your child and you means that it is more likely that your child will tell you about the abuse. Therefore the abuser may have been working hard, in quite subtle ways, to break down the relationship between you and your child.

You may find that your child's behaviour may have been increasingly difficult or hard to understand over the years or your child seems different to how they used to be. If your child is a teenager then they may have been cheeky, defiant, depressed or withdrawn for some time. This may be because the abuser has told the child that they, or you, are to blame for the abuse and that the child is unlovable. A child may have been told that if their mother loved them then she would not let the abuse continue. This would not have made your child feel good about themselves and would have led them to question their trust in you and others. We know that children who can't trust, who have low self-esteem, may act in all sorts of ways. We talk about the implications for children who have been sexually abused elsewhere in this booklet.

If your child has been told that no one would believe them if they told, then it would have been very hard for them to tell you about the abuse. Therefore, when sexual abuse is uncovered, you may need to work hard to re-establish trust and openness with your child. Many adults who were sexually abused as children talk about their feelings of anger towards their mother. Some say that their mothers should have known about the abuse and done something to stop it. A smaller number of survivors of abuse, whose mothers did know about the abuse, are still angry and cannot understand why their mother did not act to protect them. It may be difficult to accept that your child has been sexually abused within your family and that you were unaware of this. Particularly if the abuser is someone you loved and trusted.

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Responsibility and blame

The abuser will have worked hard to shift responsibility away from himself to others; it is now time to shift that responsibility back. The role that the abuser played in the sexual abuse now needs to be understood and placed out in the open. The abuser has been responsible not only for the abuse, but for making sure that everyone believes that the abuse was not his fault but somebody else's - usually the child's and the mother's. As the parent who did not abuse your child, how can you now place responsibility for the abuse where it belongs?

As stated earlier, the person responsible for the abuse is the person who committed the abuse. However, it is unlikely that saying this will suddenly make you or your child feel less responsible in some way for the abuse.

Your child is likely to go on feeling responsible because they did not tell anyone sooner. They may feel responsible for the changes that have occurred within the family, and responsible for your feelings too.

You may feel responsible for not finding out about the abuse. Many mothers of children who have been sexually abused say that looking back they can remember incidents which may have alerted them to something not being right. You may have even confronted the abuser at some time and he denied that he was abusing your child, leaving you feeling confused. You may keep these feelings of responsibility with you for some time. Perhaps it will be most helpful for you to understand the context in which child sexual abuse is committed. It is important to realise that child sexual abuse is committed in many families and that the people who abuse children work in very similar ways to ensure that everything is kept secret and that they are not held responsible.

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