Looking Forward
Where will we be in 10 years? This is a difficult question for even those with crystal balls. What can be considered, however, is social forces that may shape the future agenda for child sexual abuse research, treatment, and policy decisions.
Perhaps the most important issue is the current environment of conservatism. This environment and its concomitant political agenda have already radically affected issues of children. While great gains for children’s rights were made between 1960 and 1990, the country (USA) is experiencing a current reversal of these rights. As legitimised in the current welfare “reform” act, the federal government no longer views children as having innate rights to be fed, sheltered, and clothed.
Guardians and more specifically, single mothers, are punished as well. Some of the most marginalised members of society are thus in grave danger of being complete without resources. This environment of conservatism bodes poorly for the rights of children not to be sexually abused. If, as feminists contend, child sexual abuse is related to the abuse of power, then depowering the powerless and empowering the powerful may serve to tip the scales in favour of greater access to the sexual violation of children. When children are abused, the current conservative environment may also make it more difficult for the victims to be heard and especially, to be believed. There is also grave concern that punishing the guardians of these children will increase the children’s risk of abuse. Single mothers on welfare are now required to return to work, although the so-called welfare reform laws often exclude the resources these women need to find employment sufficient to afford safe child care.
Although findings remain inconsistent, some community prevalence surveys suggest that children are at greater risk of abuse when their mothers work than when they do not, and this relationship is especially apparent for children living only with females. It may be that these findings reflect an issue of supervision as children lose the protective influence of their mothers and sometimes, safe alternative caretakers. If inadequate supervision is the issue, then the recent passage of the child welfare reform bill, which forces single mothers back into the work force without providing adequate funding for safe child care, may have ominous implications for the risk of their children to be sexually abused.
The current environment of political conservatism and the “reform” laws may thus have dire consequences for the protection of children. While the intended effects of these supposed reforms are chilling, the unintended effects may be even greater. In a climate that strengthens the disparity of power between adults and children, males and females, and whites and persons of colour, the obvious losers are the less powerful. Whether this environment will contribute to an increased rate of sexual abuse of children remains to be seen. The possibility, however, cannot be discounted.
Theories of Child Sexual Abuse: A Historical and Sociocultural Perspective
As discussed before, the theoretical base of knowledge for child sexual abuse began with Freud’s seduction theory. After realising that most of his hysterical clients were also victims of child sexual abuse, Freud forwarded a theory of seduction in which he posited an etiological link between child sexual abuse and later hysterical symptoms. This theory was met with rejection and scorn from the professional community, and he renounced the theory only a short time later. The import of this renunciation was so profound that little work to advance the knowledge base of child sexual abuse was done for many years to come. Even so, certain lines of thought, influenced by Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, permeated the writings during this time. It is therefore not surprising that these writings, when they admitted to the occurrence of the sexual abuse, typically removed blame from the offender and placed fault for the sexual assault onto the victim, almost always assumed to be the daughter.
The first formal theory of child sexual abuse, appearing in the professional literature in the 1960s and 1970s, may be family systems theory. This theory, which derived from general systems theory, posited a systemic approach to father-daughter incest. All members of the family, including the mother and victim, were hypothesised not only to be responsible for the initiation of the incest but also to collude in its maintenance. Like the earlier writings, family systems theory (a) applied primarily to father-daughter incest and (b) continued to remove blame from the offender.
Since the mid-1970s, several more sophisticated theories of child sexual abuse have been developed. Those that attempt to clarify why certain individuals might abuse a child include sociobiological theories, feminist theory, attachment theory, and behavioural theories, including conditioning theory and social learning theory. The primary theory that focuses on why certain children are at greater risk of abuse is the feminist theory.
The following text briefly discusses the historical development of theories of child sexual abuse. Because the matter of culpability is central to this development, it is used to organise these next sections. Freud’s theory was amply discussed before. Therefore, these texts start with the era following Freud.
Theories of Culpability
Seduction by the Daughter
As discussed in the previous texts, certain important writers following Freud continued to acknowledge that child sexual abuse did occur. A few early studies also acknowledged its occurrence but often rationalised that the daughter had seduced her father. The import of Freud’s Oedipus complex in these early studies is obvious. After rejecting his childhood seduction theory, Freud posited an internal aetiology for child sexual abuse. As such, a victim reporting an abuse incident was said to be confusing the abuse memory with her fantasised desire as a child for her unavailable love object-the father. If abuse clearly did occur, it was, therefore, logical to place the blame on the daughter, who was said to be acting out her desire for her unavailable love object.
The offender was then conceptualised as falling within the seducer’s spell. When placed within the perspective of Freud’s influence, it is perhaps easier to understand why many writings of this early period blamed the victim. Regretfully, however, this trend of blaming the victim continued into more recent literature, and examples were fairly frequent even in literature published in the 1980s. For example, a study published in 1980 divided victims of incest into two groups-participant victims (those who had in some way encouraged the initiation or continuation of the sexual relationship) and accidental victims (those who had not done so). One of the discriminating features of the groups was whether abuse had occurred more than once. If it had, the victim was assumed to have participated because she must have encouraged or initiated the abuse. The researchers commented on the “clearly seductive style” of one participant victim, a six-year-old girl who had been forced to masturbate her father since she was two years of age.
In 1982, Yates also concluded that “the majority of youngsters have become not only victims but participants”. These children purportedly did not report the abuse because of the “gratification that the incest provides”. In his case study of an 18-month-old toddler who had been sexually abused since birth, Yates reported that the child’s foster mother “could not lie down on the bed when he was awake, as he would crawl on top of her and attempt to burrow under her clothes”. If a woman visited, he would “sit on her lap, wrap his arms around her neck, and deliver sensuous kisses. Then he would attempt to open her blouse or lift her skirt”.
He went on to state that “eroticized preschool children… [are] readily orgasmic and also maintain a high level of arousal without orgasm”. Other permutations to the theory of seduction by the daughter are also found in the literature. For example, because not all girls were molested, Karl Abraham, an early follower of Freud, suggested that there must be something intrinsically wrong with those who were. On the other hand, Cohen suggested that the daughter initiated and participated in the incestuous relationship to keep the family together. The incipient guilt from having her incestuous fantasy realised, Cohen suggested, then enabled the daughter to recognise her responsibility for the abuse. Other historical literature suggested instead that the daughter was “seeking oral gratification from the father as a result of rejection by the mother”.
Occasional literature published in the 1990s also alludes to the daughter’s culpability. For example, Lacey found that 18 of 112 female bulimic patients asked about a history of either incestuous abuse or incestuous fantasies reported experiencing incestuous feelings or fantasies and, “for two, the fantasies were in part acted out”. The researchers suggested that “the relationship [between incestuous fantasies and actual abuse] can become blurred to the point of being indistinguishable, particularly if the patient has incorporated such thoughts into neurotic conflict”. Another article published by Larson in 1993 presented a case study of an adolescent female abused by her father. This adolescent, “through continual reflection and discussion of the therapeutic relationship dynamics…was increasingly able to see the active role she’d played in her own incest”.
Even though the professional literature has fewer examples of blaming the victim, some professionals continue to consider the victim partially culpable for the abuse. Many different studies have now assessed how professionals assign culpability for child sexual abuse. It is perhaps not surprising that early studies found that professionals attributed a substantial portion of the responsibility for the abuse to the victims themselves. For example, in an early survey, Galdston found that 52% of surveyed psychiatrists believed that daughters usually contributed to the incest. Studies published in the 1980s continued this pattern. In one of these studies, 35% of law enforcement officers and 69% of child protective service workers considered teenage victims to be as guilty as the abusive
father. Eisenberg, Owens and Dewey also found that just more than half of medical personnel attached some blame to the victim. In other studies in which attribution of blame was measured on a scale from 1 (no blame) to 5 (high blame), the mean score for victim culpability ranged from 1.83 to 2.65.
Even studies published in the 1990s, however, continue to find that 12% to 45% of professionals attribute some responsibility to the victim. One of these studies concluded that mental health professionals do not blame victims. Yet, while the allocation of blame to the victim was low (below 30%), 37% of male respondents and 24% of female respondents did allocate some blame to the victim. Another study published in 1993 found that, on a scale of 0 (no responsibility) to 5 (very responsible), attribution of blame to the victim ranged from .12 to .25 for “resisting” victims and from .67 to 1.65 for “encouraging” victims (p. 64). Finally, Johnson et al. found that approximately half of the teachers and social workers queried said that there was some likelihood that an impetus for the abuse was the daughter’s seductive behaviour. This literature, therefore, suggests that professionals still do not, as a whole, endorse the opinion of child sexual abuse experts-that the victim is never to blame. That any blame is assigned to the victim by professionals working with child sexual abuse victims has far-reaching implications.
The mere existence of a victim blame factor, however slight, reflects an apparent belief that incest victims may in some way be responsible for their own assault, and that children … may be held less than fully innocent in their actions in sexual matters when approached by adults who are most often family members, relatives, or people they know well and trust. Although the professional literature appears to be responding by reducing the number of published papers that suggest victim culpability, it is of concern that professional attribution of blame continues to some degree. While professionals may assign only a small amount of the blame to victims, some are too much.
