My car stereo got jacked last week and, being that I have nothing to listen to on the way to work, I’ve acually been thinking instead of driving to and from work in a semi-hypnotic stupor.
I started thinking about the Catholic sex abuse scandal and whether or not it could have happeded had the children been properly educated about their own bodies and about sharing(or not) sexual experiences with others.
If these children were properly educated about their sexuality as children would this have been able to continue unchecked for so long? Is proper sexual education in publuc schools a way to reduce sexual child abuse? What so you think?
I never had sex education at school and I sure as hell would have known that something was wrong if a clergyman raped me. How stupid do you think children are, that they don’t know the difference between normal and abnormal behavior unless a teacher tells them? Ever heard of parents?
Just because you don’t take a formal sex ed class doesn’t mean kids don’t know what’s going on. Hell, there are probably 13 year olds out there who know more than I do these days via experience, not a classroom.
Sex ed?
Nah, don’t think that would make much of a difference.
Social emotional stuff might help though. Education about how to listen to one’s feelings, how to assert one’s self, how to access caring adults who can protect them, how to keep lines of communication open.
Victim of abuse chiming in here. A Priest did not abuse me, but the same kind of thoughts went through my head that probably went through the victims. A trustedauthority figure sexually molests you. He then tells you to ‘keep this a secret’ or something like that.
You are ashamed of what happened and don’t want to tell anyone else about it.
Since your abuser is trusted by people you trust (and you trust him) you must have somehow asked for this to happen to you, because he would not do this, since he is trusted, unless you asked.
A Person With Authority has told you to keep quite about something
You are sure that no one will believe you because this is so strange/different from what is supposed to happen.
These four reasons for not telling an adult would be present even if kids got sex ed in nursery school. Sex Ed will not help. I agree with greck that caring adults who know that this is a possibly and have built trust with the kids are needed. Kids need to know that they can talk to adults about the bad stuff that happens. This kind of accessing adults is not taught in sex ed. It is only learned when adults make themselves available to children. I can’t explain how or where or what we as adults need to do now to make ourselves accessible to kids, but I know it has to be done. I also can’t over emphasize number 2. It is still taking me YEARS to believe, down where I live, that I did not ask for this to happen to me.
I’d like to add a couple things to what Reepicheep said.
Don’t forget that many of these cases are from many years ago. How many parents would have taken their child seriously if he came home and said ‘Father X raped me’?
I was abused by my father. I knew it was wrong on a gut level but I berated myself for feeling so disgusted by what was happening… I thought I must be the bad one for hating what he was doing to me because he was my father and he would never do anything that was bad to me.
Unfortunately sex education in schools is a joke. Teachers are allowed to teach anatomy and not much else (at least where I went) We learned nothing useful during class.
Eventually when I learned there were places I could go for help too much time had elapsed and I thought people would feel I asked for the abuse because I took so long to report it.