In the U.S. 1 in 7 children are abused with estimated 3.3 million children abused annually, this being only the reported cases. As a child abuse survivor of sexual, physical, pschycological, and emotional abuse I was never once given an opprotunity to tell someone. I don’t understand why kids aren’t given surveys asking them about their home life or why kids aren’t educated in school about what abuse is. If kids were taught what abuse is they would be more likely to come forth with how they were being abused at home this would also make more kids educated as to why someone may have low self esteem and have trouble developing social skills. I think many are ignorant to what child abuse is and how it affects peoples lives. Why aren’t schools and law enforcement doing more to prevent the abuse of defenless children.
May I ask what kind of opportunity would have worked for you? I mean, presumably you could have initiated a conversation with someone on the matter, but I suppose you mean someone initiating the conversation themselves. Do you think this would have been enough for you? I’d guess (although I am fairly ignorant on the matter) there is no middle ground that is enough to get abused children to speak up without being rather offensive to parents.
There are a large number of programs that do provide school-based education on child abuse.
SCAN (Stop Child Abuse and Neglect) - This is the Huntsville, Alabama site, but there are also programs in other cities.
Speak Up Be Safe - A school-based child abuse prevention program from Childhelp.
Prevent Child Abuse Delaware - A list of school programs covering kindergarten through 4th grade.
I’m amazed you never got such education-- I did many times, growing up, from a wide variety of sources. And every time, it was stressed that we could tell a teacher.
It’s also worth mentioning that often children have been raised to believe that they actually deserve the abuse and that if they tell they are just exposing that they are “bad” children.
I still hear some adults say things like, “Sure, my dad beat me, but it made me a better person.”
Most people when they say that are talking about physical punishment basically, not sexual child abuse which is a totally different topic.
Possibly, but that doesn’t make Tethered Kite’s comment any less true.
I haven’t been active in the US public school system for a long, long time, but even back in the '80s when I worked for a school district there were school events addressing all kinds of abuse, and kids were always asked to tell their teacher, principal, or social worker if there was abuse in the home. The OP seems to believe the schools should be asking or “surveying” each child about abuse. Schools around here can’t even afford to pay for math teachers, so I doubt they’ll be able to scrape up money for what the OP is suggesting.
There was plenty of abuse education (sexual and otherwise) in my elementary school days (1980s).
Schools go over this all the time, especially with young kids. Teachers are mandated reporters and must report any suspected abuse to DCFS, but they do not take each d out in the hall every month and question him about abuse.
If you do a survey, all of the kids who marked that they were abused may be subject to child protection investigations.
Mandatory reporting and all that. (And yet…teachers still aren’t reporting!)
I likewise was talked to about this. I also know of programs where the teacher is taught for signs of abuse, and has ways of pulling the kid aside and finding out about the abuse, even if the child doesn’t want to tell due to intimidation.
I’d guess that the OP either grew up before this sort of thing became common, in an area where people don’t take it seriously as they should, wound up in a really bad school, or was just very unlucky and missed all the days when this stuff was discussed.
Also, sometimes the abuse manages to be abuse while staying clear of the kind of phrasing people often link to abuse. My parents never “hit me”, but those rows of bruises from Mommy Dearest’s pinching aren’t my idea of what love looks like. Children tend to be more literal than adults: if you’d asked me whether my parents hit me, which is how people tend to describe physical abuse, I would truthfully have answered “no”. Also, too often people asume that only males abuse (sexually or otherwise) - as if those harpies we’ve all met as adults would turn into rainbows and candy when they get home!
When were you a kid? I was born in 1974, and it seemed like the grown ups never *stopped *talking to us about child abuse.
It’s quite possible for an abused child to be at school and there be a discussion of abuse and what to do and the kid just misses it. Kids–hell, people–miss a lot of what is going on around them. Our internal filter listens for just a second, and if something seems irrelevant, it all turns into Charlie Brown Adult Speak. I had at least one kid not notice I was pregnant until I was a week from my due date–not only did I look huge, but I talked about the baby and being gone soon quite a bit. He wasn’t an idiot, just spacey, and I guess his brain filtered out baby talk as irrelevant. I encounter other examples of kids not ever having heard of things I know I have said to the class they were in multiple times–dozens of times–nearly every day. And I don’t mean they don’t remember details–I mean they never heard anything about that research paper, or this thing called a '“thesis statement” or whatever.
Anyway, they all have their moments of spaciness, or deep internal reflection, and I can imagine an abused kid might well be even spacier than average: they have a lot to think about. They might well also not think of themselves as “abused”: it seems like it’s different when it’s you, I am sure. “Abuse” is a horrible act by a horrible person. What is happening at home is different because it’s not simple. I think this is especially true for sexual abuse, where I suspect victims do not spend a lot of time thinking about and generalizing what happens to them. They don’t put names to acts or tell the story of what happened to themselves or anyone else, the way people do with healthy events. They Don’t Think About It, which means they may not connect what is happening to them to that abuse thing, so when the teacher starts droning on about that child abuse hotline, they zone out, because it has nothing to do with them.
I don’t know what to do about this. As a teacher, I overcome spaciness with lots of repetition and lots of individual conferences (which is how I know how much they miss in class). That works really well for teaching them to write an essay. I am not at all sure how you do that for identifying victims of sexual abuse without making that the point of the class, with regular individual conferences asking about abuse at home. That seems pretty problematic.
Exactly. I was born in 1980 and it was so prevalent that you can make allusions to specific campaigns and everybody else knows what you’re talking about. “The cat keeps touching me in my bathing suit area!”
Education was also prevalent for me, born in 77. I even got roped into going to an elementary school to give a talk to the kids when I was in like 8th grade or so. I guess they thought having young kids hear it from slightly older kids would work better, or something.
It’s been decades since I’ve set foot in a public school, but even WAY back in the 70’s and 80’s we were taught about good touches vs. bad touches, how we should TELL SOMEONE (a teacher, police officer, trusted adult, etc.) if we were being hurt at home, etc. I can’t imagine things are any different today.
By comparison, I remember reading a letter to Dear Abby or Ann Landers about 1970; a mother complained that they had figured out that Thier babysitter, a 14yo boy, had been molesting their daughter. When they went to talk to other parents - apparently the kid babysat all over the neighbourhood - most parents did not want to talk to them or talk about it. From the description of their reactions, they did everything but put their hands over their ears and shout “La-la-la…” They just did not want to deal with it; they wanted the matter to go away. That seemed to be the prevalent attitude in those days.
Of course, it was the same with domestic violence. When one of the women MPs stood up in Canadian parliament and started complaining about the level of domestic violence, a large number of the male MPs laughed. Perhaps it was a nervous laughter, because it was a topic that nobody wanted to address. Before the days of zero tolerance, (and even now), spouses who try to report anything were doubly threatened and it seemed the courts did nothing to address the issue.
Perhaps it was lingering Victorian prudery, but nobody wanted to address the issue. Hence the current overreaction where every attention by a stranger is interpreted as a desire for sexual abuse.
Consider that Lewis Carrol, besides telling stories of Wonderland to Alice, also used to take pictures of young naked girls with that newfangled “camera” thingy; with their parents’ consent and often with the mothers’ supervision. They bought his story that it was “art and beauty” and nobody really thought what we would think today.
There is one theory that Freud was a fraud. Much of his practice was young women suffering from “hysteria”. A theory put forward by those like Jeffrey Masson, who worked in the Freud archives (until he published this) said that Freud realized early on that his patients’ problems stemmed from childhood sexual abuse, likely by a family member or house servant. However, he also realized the career-limiting results of accusing some of Vienna’s most prominent families of child-molesting, in the days when that was not talked about. Instead he made up the fantasy about Oedipus and Electra complexes and sexual obsession to explain away this trauma as fantasy. He sent psychiatry on a 100-year wrong turn to save his career.
So it happened, seems it’s happened for a long time, yet people did not want to have to address it until the 1980’s. We would rather think the bad guys are some hairy smelly child murderer lurking in the woods, than someone in our own house.
Finally, I have to question that 7%. It depends on the question; for example, another questionnaire IIRC said 30% of women had been sexually harrassed. However, this included being told dirty jokes, bra snapping in high school, thinking they were gossiped about, etc. It’s much like the “did they hit you?” question. The question is always one of degree. The groups with an agenda want the number to be high and their surveys will be worded to reflect that.
False positives can be potentially damaging, both to the children in question and suspected adults - and unfortunately, children are not always very reliable witnesses, even when recounting something about themselves (adult witnesses are unreliable enough, but children even more so).
The result of such surveys (and follow-up actions) probably would detect more of the genuine abuse that is currently going on below the radar - which is a good thing - but it would also result in damaging interference to a (probably larger) set of individuals who are not currently being abused - sort of like what happened here.
If you set humans to go looking for something, with unlimited search scope, it’s not unusual for them to report that they found it in places where it is not actually present.
I certainly remember programmes in primary and secondary school educating us about how to recognise and address child abuse.
Surveys (and other ways of directly asking children) would be problematic. Consider the phrasing in the survey:
Ex 1) Does mummy or daddy hit you? - No (but they lock me in the cupboard/pinch me/withhold food/say I’m worthless)
Ex 2) Is mummy or daddy mean to you? - Yes (they didn’t let me watch telly and eat sweets yesterday)
What would a survey ever tell you about child abuse? The only way to go about it is make clear to children what abuse is (with examples, stories, talks etc) and then what to do about it. Further more, teachers, coaches and GPs should be (and IME are) aware of the signs of abuse and ready to carefully address the issue with the child in question if anything is suspected.
There are people on this board who have experience of the terrible consequences of false accusations, and I suspect more general screening would produce vast quantities of false accusations, while only uncovering very few more real cases.