|
NZ Herald
February 2, 2002
Unravelling secrets of sexual abuse
by Simon Collins
Shona
didn't tell anyone in her family about what happened in her childhood until
her own daughter turned 4. That was when the flashbacks began.
"I was not coping," she says. "I
couldn't stop the flashbacks, and so I just knew that either I was going to
go nuts or I needed to get some help."
Shona was 4 when her grandfather first raped her. It is one of her earliest
memories.
"He didn't get full penetration, but I got quite a few infections and I
was hospitalised just for a day," she says.
Her family didn't realise what had happened. "They were under the
impression that I was playing with myself."
It continued for two years. "I do remember that it only happened during
the daytime. I assume that he was babysitting."
Two older boys and her next-door neighbour sexually abused her, too. "I
used to go over there to play his piano. Although I knew he'd do things, I
still went.
"I blamed myself. I thought I was a hugely naughty girl and I was too
afraid to tell anyone."
When Shona (not her real name) was 6, her grandfather died, and the abuse
ended. But her self-image was fixed. She got into "alcohol, drugs, sex
at a young age, all that."
"I was too afraid to say no. I was easily abused and I continued up to
my 30s to be hurt."
Finally, she stopped drinking. At 37, she now looks after her three children
by herself.
She credits five years of counselling - both group therapy, where it was
"just amazing to know that I was normal, as far as survivors were
concerned", and weekly one-to-one sessions which attract a $50 subsidy
each time from the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC).
ACC also pays for three hours' childcare for each session.
"I seem to be very lucky because the ACC has been wonderfully helpful to
me. My case managers have been wonderful and that takes the pressure
off."
There are thousands of women like Shona. Not all have found help.
Yet there is another side to this issue. In 1992 Gordon Waugh, of Whenuapai,
was accused by his daughter of sexually abusing her 30 years earlier.
On the website of the organisation he co-founded, Casualties of Sexual
Allegations (Cosa), Waugh writes: . [Webmaster note: This following
quote by the Herald is a misquote, wrong and libellous. The Herald should
have stated that it was “alleged” that he had carried out such crimes]
"I had committed incest with her I had fondled her breasts. When she was
a baby ... an uncle had taken her on a trip from Auckland to Whangarei and had inserted his
fingers into her vagina. The fact that we lived in Blenheim at the time, not Auckland, escaped
her."
There were "many, many other allegations", but Waugh says none of
them checked against the facts.
His daughter, supported by her sister, complained to the police that Waugh
had indecently assaulted her. Police investigated but no charges were laid.
For Waugh and his wife Colleen, it was "like a death in the
family". They haven't seen their daughters for 10 years, and have no
contact with four grandchildren and a 1-year-old great-grandchild.
Waugh blames the ACC. Not only did it pay the counsellor who helped his
daughter to "recover" her memory, but it also paid his daughter
lump-sum compensation of up to $10,000.
Ever since, Waugh has fought the issue. He laid a criminal complaint against
the counsellor to the police, which was not acted on. He has spent a decade
pursuing the ACC, the Ombudsman and the Privacy Commissioner to obtain the
details of what his daughter received.
"A few days ago, I received the Privacy Commissioner's final
opinion," he told the Weekend Herald a week ago. "I believe he has
been captured by the nonsense spoken by counsellors generally."
Waugh, too, is not alone. A Porirua man tells how in 1989 a lesbian couple
asked him to donate sperm so they could have a baby. He was surprised but
said, with a smile, "I suppose I could make the ultimate
sacrifice." Then he went on holiday, and came back to find his house
plastered with the word "Rapist!"
He called the police, who suspected that it was done so that the couple could
get a $10,000 lump sum from the ACC to compensate for his "abuse".
The police officer who came round said, "This is happening all over the
country."
At the peak, in 1992, 6000 people lodged sexual abuse claims with ACC in just
three months, up dramatically from 2173 in the whole previous year and 1075
the year before that.
In the same year, Christchurch Civic Creche worker Peter Ellis was arrested on
charges of sexual assault. There were similar cases in the United States and Australia.
Partly in response to the surge of sexual abuse claims, the National
Government abolished lump-sum compensation for all accidents from October
1992.
Sexual abuse claims to ACC dropped almost as quickly as they had risen, from
10,892 in 1992-93 to 4872 in 1999-2000, before rising slightly to 5580 in the
year to last June.
In October 2000, Waugh wound up the Auckland
branch of Cosa after "a lengthy period without any new cases" of
false sexual abuse allegations. The organisation continues only in Christchurch.
But he worries that this may be about to change. Ten years after lump sum
compensation was abolished, Helen Clark's Labour Government is restoring it
from April 1.
Last month Christchurch
law firm Wakefield Associates sent fliers to 1 million households telling
sexual abuse survivors: "You may be entitled to a lump sum of up to
$25,000 and ongoing payments valued in excess of $150,000."
Waugh is also concerned that the ideology of "recovered memory"
still flourishes - especially in the clinical psychology doctoral programme
at Auckland University, the country's largest
source of trained psychologists.
A friend and former lecturer at the university, Dr Robert Mann, says students
have been refused admission to the doctoral programme if they did not affirm
belief in recovered memory.
The senior professor in the psychology department, Professor Mike Corballis,
says that when he was department head a few years ago he was worried about
the way students were chosen for the programme on the basis of their
"suitability" to be psychologists, rather than their academic
records.
"There were rumours that you had to cry," he says.
Corballis set up a committee including outside psychologists to make the
selections. But Waugh and Mann continue to be suspicious, partly because the
course's co-director, Dr John Read, is an outspoken survivor of sexual abuse
and has devoted much of his career to researching the effects of abuse on
people's later mental history.
As Corballis puts it: "He is often very emotional in giving talks about
sexual abuse. He certainly has an emotional impact on the students."
Trying to sort the facts from the emotion in such a highly-charged field is
difficult. But, as Shona's life story shows, there is no doubt that sexual
abuse can have traumatic long-term effects.
An Otago University
survey of 2000 Dunedin
women in the late 80s found that 32 per cent said they had been sexually
abused before the age of 16. Of these, 20 per cent had experienced genital
contact, and 6 per cent actual or attempted intercourse.
The perpetrator was a family member in 38 per cent of cases, an acquaintance
for 46 per cent and a stranger for 15 per cent. One in 10 stepfathers and one
in 100 natural fathers had sexually abused their children.
The study found a clear link between childhood sexual abuse and later mental
illness.
Even after allowing for other casual factors such as broken families, women
who suffered sexual abuse involving intercourse in childhood were 12 times
more likely than the average woman to be admitted to hospital for psychiatric
care later.
Clearly, some sexual abuse claims are false. But ACC says it gets
proportionately fewer false claims for sexual abuse than for other injuries.
Three former students of the clinical psychology course at Auckland University,
and a support person who was present at another student's entry interview,
all say recovered memory of sexual abuse did not arise in their interviews.
"My feeling is that you have to toe the line with them, yes. You have to
basically agree with everything they say or you might have problems,"
one former student says.
"But it's like teacher training - you go through it and take everything
with a grain of salt. I don't think everyone comes out thinking that sexual
abuse is the cause of everything."
Another former student says most students in the course also take papers in
psychiatry, where there is scepticism about recovered memory. "We are
exposed to both sides."
Counsellors say ACC has become much more restrictive about giving financial
compensation for sexual abuse since 1997, when it began using American
Medical Association guidelines to assess how much people's functioning has
been impaired by their injuries.
"Independence allowances", a weekly payment which replaced lump
sums in 1992, have dropped from 2.7 per cent of all sexual abuse clients in
1996-97 to just 0.8 per cent in 2000-01.
Although lump sums are being restored this year, the same AMA guidelines will
restrict them to a tiny fraction of people who are sexually abused from April
1 onwards, and then only after their condition has stabilised enough to
determine whether they are permanently "impaired".
Sensitive claims manager Gail Kettle expects that most of those who do
receive lump sums will get only between $2500 and $5000.
At the same time, she is tightening controls on the 700 private sector
counsellors who get ACC subsidies for sexual abuse cases. From later this
year, a new group of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists will assess all
clients independently after 10 counselling sessions.
Ten years after complaints peaked, there are tentative signs that increased
public awareness just may be starting to change the actual level of abuse.
Sexually abused children admitted to Auckland's Starship children's hospital
child abuse units have fallen from more than 700 a year in the early 1990s to
300-400 in the past year.
Criminal convictions for sex offences against under-17-year-olds dropped from
2066 in 1996 to 1173 in 2000.
But former Children's Commissioner Ian Hassall, now at Auckland University of
Technology, says it would be too much to expect a big change in behaviour in
10 years.
"In the Otago study, there was no significant difference between older
and younger women, so over that period there hasn't been any change in the
incidence of sexual abuse," he says.
"It's also a problem that occurs in every society that one knows
of."
Shona believes her grandfather's behaviour was a power issue.
"I thought maybe he wasn't getting it from my grandmother. She was quite
a tyrant. Did he need to become powerful by using me?" she asks.
Dr Miriam Saphira, a psychologist who worked for 12 years with sex offenders
at Mt Eden Prison, says the men abused children because they were
"unable to express their emotions" and so had difficulty in adult
relationships.
John McCarthy, who runs Auckland's
Safe Network programme for child abusers, says many offenders have been
sexually abused as children themselves or come from troubled families -
problems exacerbated by social influences.
"We live in a society that is pretty sexualised and there are sexual
images that come by way of things like pornography and parts of the
media."
His programme tries to change the men's attitudes and sexual arousal patterns
- "giving the men a sense of control over their thought patterns and
their fantasies around children".
"We are developing in the men a sense of real understanding and
awareness of what it's like to be a child who experiences sexual abuse at
their hands, so it isn't some 'romantic encounter' that occurred but a
harmful, aggressive, violent, coerced situation."
McCarthy says his programme works. In a follow-up study on adolescents who
went through it, none had reoffended 18 months later.
Hassall believes sexual abuse will stop only when non-offenders stop
"turning a blind eye when they think that something like this is going
on".
He suggests that communities could declare themselves "child
abuse-free" in the same way that many adopted "nuclear-free"
status in the 1980s.
To qualify, local businesses would need to cater for children and let their
parents take time off work when they needed to care for them. Children would
be acknowledged as "part of the world, not hidden away somewhere as a
shameful badge of inefficiency".
"We might pay less attention to sponsorship of sport and a little more
attention to sponsorship of families with children in need, through groups
such as Barnardos and Plunket.
"When you start looking at it constructively about what each person can
do, there are a lot of things that every social institution and every part of
the social fabric can do."
|
