Child Sexual Abuse is off the Mark

By Clare Mounteer
Director, Monterey Rape Crisis Center
and Carol Kaplan
Director of Student Services, Monterey Rape Crisis Center
Special to The Herald
July 11, 1999
Monterey, CA

Unlike the researchers in the American Psychological Association's study on child sexual abuse, we are not at all surprised that there has been a public outcry regarding the study's conclusion. The study reportedly found that the effects of sexual abuse on a sample of 59 college students "were neither pervasive nor typically intense."

This is not and never has been, our experience of the truly damaged clients who seek help from local therapists or directly from the Monterey Rape Crisis Center. Just this morning -- June 22 -- a woman came in for counseling relating to abuse she suffered when she was 8 years old. She is now in her forties, but wept inconsolably describing her abuse. Until now she has been too fearful and ashamed to seek any psychological help. This is the typical response of a survivor of child sexual abuse seen by the Monterey Rape Crisis Center.

Also, unlike the study, we have not found that men react less negatively than women. There is a potential for harm any time two people engage in a sexual relationship they do not both choose to be in. We question the hypothetical example of a "mature 15-year-old adolescent boy who willingly engages in sex with an unrelated adult." How many 15-year-olds of either gender can freely give consent in a sexual encounter with an adult? Very few.

The suggestion that the behavior "may represent only a violation of social norms with no implication for personal harm" is insulting not only to the men who come to the center's men's support group trying to heal from the impact sexual abuse has had on their lives, but to the many men who have very definitely been harmed by child sexual abuse and have not yet reached out for help.

The Monterey Rape Crisis Center provides one of the very few support groups anywhere for adult male survivors of child sexual abuse. Why are there so few of them? In part because of attitudes like those of the authors of the APA study.

We further question the use of such a limited sample in drawing such broad conclusions. Only 59 people? Only college-age students? In our experience it is often not until later in life that adult survivors of child sexual abuse realize what an impact it has had on them. Sometimes it is only after years of using drugs or alcohol, and/or experiencing lifelong difficulties in forming intimate relationships with others, that an adult survivor may identify childhood sexual abuse as a cause of these problems. Only then do they reach out for help.

Finally, we cannot agree with the researchers who suggest that the term "adult-adolescent sex" or "adult-child sex" be substituted, in some cases, for "child sexual abuse." We should call this behavior what it is -- a crime. Children, including adolescents, are vulnerable. Adults need to assume responsibility in protecting them from any situation that could traumatize them.