By Australia Broadcasting Corp's Sarah Dingle
Updated Mon Aug 12, 2013 2:44pm AEST
Institutional child sex abuse is only the tip of the iceberg, and unless we realise that the vast majority of abuse occurs within the family home, we have little hope of removing it from our society, writes Sarah Dingle.
When it comes to conversations about child sexual abuse, it's sometimes a race to see who can get the most outraged first. Around the water cooler, paedophiles and child sex offenders are one bunch of sinister offenders we can all agree to hate.
Unfortunately, there's two problems with this. First of all, our notion of a child sex offender or a paedophile is out of whack with reality. We think of older, isolated, possibly quite creepy-looking men.
The overwhelming majority of perpetrators are male, but that's about the only thing we have right. The most common age of offending for men who sexually abuse children is actually the 30s and 40s, according to criminologist and psychologist Professor Stephen Smallbone of Queensland's Griffith University. And there is a terrible reason why.
"That's a time where there's a particular set of opportunities which hadn't been previously available," says Professor Smallbone. "So for a man in his 30s or 40s, that's an age when he's likely to first have his own children, who are coming into the peak risk age of sexual victimisation of around 12, 13, or 14."
At this age, simply put, men are more likely to be around children at home, either their own or someone else's.
In 70 to 80 per cent of all child sex abuse cases, there is a familial relationship between the child victim and the offender, according to Professor Smallbone's research. Around 15 per cent of those abusers are the victim's biological father. The rest are boyfriends, or stepfathers, or other adult males in an authority role.
The allegations of child abuse currently being heard by the Royal Commission by priests and teachers are horrible. But the Royal Commission will not examine the majority of child sexual abuse. Its terms of reference specifically exclude any abuse that involves the family. A spokesperson for the Attorney General says this is to ensure there can be "concrete recommendations within a reasonable timeframe".
The second problem with our rush to condemn the abusers is that sometimes, as a society, we're not very kind to the victims - particularly the victims of intra-familial child sexual abuse.
Taylor* is 15, and lives in regional New South Wales. She was raped by her biological father for more than a year, starting at the age of 10. He only saw Taylor during sporadic access visits. From the age of 10, almost every time Taylor saw her father, he sexually abused her. He was eventually charged with 74 charges ranging from indecent assault to aggravated sexual assault.
Taylor was suffering. But some of those around her didn't help. In fact, they made it much worse. While Taylor was still at primary school, she first spoke about the abuse, and her father was charged.
Taylor naturally wanted to confide in someone her own age. She told one of her friends. But later down the track, they had a tiff, says her mother, Larissa*. The friend then used that information as a weapon and told other people.
"She wasn't even a teen at the time," Larissa says. "It's hard for her to confide in people her own age. She just hasn't been able to tell anyone."
While horrible, it's likely that Taylor's young friend didn't understand just how damaging her actions were. But adults also behaved poorly towards Taylor.
"The principal of the (primary) school told her to get over it and not bring it to school with her," Larissa* said. "She changed schools because of it. I pulled all of my kids out of that school."
Taylor is now at high school, and much happier. But school is still a struggle.
"I still miss a lot of time off school, because obviously at school you have sex ed. You have the kids that randomly joke about rape," she said.
"Every time that happens I get flashbacks. I end up having lots of time off school."
Liz* is a calm, tall 46-year-old. But she, too, has been haunted by flashbacks of abuse all her life.
She doesn't know what age her grandfather began abusing her - all she knows is that it stopped when she was four and a half, and threw a tantrum about having to go to his house.
After that, her young mind blocked it out.
"I had no memories of the abuse until I was 15 and a half probably," Liz said. "When I was first starting to, you know, get interested in boys, and it came back in a sudden whoosh ... And I can remember just feeling physically sick like I was going to be ill ... When it's something which happens with all these things coming back, you really doubt your sanity."
Liz's parents didn't speak about the abuse with her until about four decades after it stopped. Liz didn't even realise they knew.
"After my 40s, there was an incident in my family about someone being abused in a separate way and I didn't like how people were reacting to that information, I thought they needed to be more sensitive about it," she said.
"So I ended up saying I knew how they felt because I had experienced it. And it came out that my parents had actually known during that time. And that again was another horrible moment, it was a bit like the flashbacks in a way. I felt like my world fell apart."
Liz hasn't even told most of her extended family about what her grandfather did to her.
"You want to tell people to get it out," she said.
"What's kept me from doing that is I came from a small country town, where everyone knows everyone. I have cousins and his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren that are living there in that town.
"If I say what he did, and I do it in a public way, I'm really worried about the effect that would have on him and those children and family members that are completely innocent. Of then having to deal with his legacy ... I think a family gets tainted by that background, and when that happens that filters down to their children, their friends as well, you know, parents being concerned about children playing with them, things like that."
"It's very easy to demonise a stranger," says the head of the Social Justice Research Centre at Edith Cowan University, Professor Caroline Taylor.
"But when you actually point out to people that the most dangerous place for a child is in the family unit, people don't like it because it's too close to home.
"It also means they'd need to be looking inwards to their own family and friendship networks than external, so that's a difficult thing for people to accept."
Community reluctance to face intra-familial child sexual abuse means that some victims, like Francis*, are even blamed for what happens by those around them.
Francis was married and living with John* when she had Clementine*.
John began to abuse Clementine when she was a toddler. Clementine didn't disclose this until she was 12 years old.
John was ultimately convicted of eight charges, including three of sexual intercourse with a person under 10.
Francis' world crumbled when the disclosure took place, and the guilt began. But people who should have supported her chose to make it worse.
"I've had people tell me that 'Obviously, you're a bad mum'. And 'Obviously, you didn't do it for him sexually, did you', those kinds of things," she said.
"So it's very stereotypical response where the blame is on the woman."
Francis says those people included family and friends.
"It was as if I had some kind of disease. But I know now that it's not my fault," she said.
Taken individually, these stories could be blamed on poor behaviour by a handful of people, but unfortunately they are not uncommon experiences.
"What we like to do is, we like to anonymise and keep at a distance a reality that we find unpalatable," said Professor Caroline Taylor.
If we're determined to stop child abuse, maybe we should be a little kinder and more open to the victims - even if that means opening our eyes to something very close to home.
*The names referred to in this article have been changed.
