At the end of this month Penn State will host a conference on childhood sexual abuse. It will highlight the university’s efforts to respond to what is possibly the greatest crisis ever to befall it and the community of proud alumni and supporters.
Hearing the voices of the voiceless
by Larry Conrad
Some victims of childhood sexual abuse find voice and healing in the creation of art. One survivor, Chris, at age 16, expresses his image of his place in the world through a drawing of a boy curled up in a ball in a mostly-dark room.
Community Voice
Larry Conrad (72) is Professor Emeritus of Arabic and Middle East Studies, University of Hamburg, Germany. A survivor of childhood sexual abuse himself, he has worked with many male survivors in recovery and is the former site administrator for MaleSurvivor.
At the end of this month Penn State will host a conference on childhood sexual abuse. It will highlight the university’s efforts to respond to what is possibly the greatest crisis ever to befall it and the community of proud alumni and supporters.
This will be a decisive step to move discussion away from recriminations and punitive action to consideration of positive strategic measures.
Many survivors pursuing their own healing journey, myself included, will recognize the significance this shift. At some point a survivor learns that no degree of punishment or rage can compensate him/her (hereafter referred to in the masculine) for the terrible harm he has suffered. The challenge comes when he must examine the past in order to shape a more positive future. There is a profound difference between “Who can we blame?” and “How can we heal?” It is upon this latter question that the survivor’s future will turn. The same can be said for the Penn State and State College community in the wake of the Sandusky trial.
This is not to minimize the importance of the quest for justice. Sandusky himself is likely to die in prison, and any who enabled his crimes should also be held accountable. This process is the legal reckoning that expresses society’s determination that child abuse can never be tolerated.
However for victims this reckoning does not bring closure, but marks a transition to a new phase with its own issues. As one fourteen-year-old survivor said after testifying against his father for years of abuse:
“They said, ‘You’re a brave boy. You should be proud. This is a turning point in your life.’ But all I can think about is what’s going to happen now?”
Our attention should turn to the welfare of survivors, and we should consider whether the well-intended gestures of support offered thus far actually help. Victims of abuse, Sandusky’s included, face years of struggle to recover from a shattered childhood, form a healthy and functional self-image out of the rubble of guilt, shame,and confusion, and find their way in a world where abuse has taught them that no one can be trusted.
The importance of perspective
The problem of child sexual sexual abuse extends far beyond Sandusky’s known victims, and should cause us to broaden our focus. One study of convicted pedophiles concludes that “situational” abusers like Sandusky – molesters of children outside their family circle – abuse an average of about 150 boys. Figures as high as 450 have been confirmed. Even at the level of the family unit the facts can be staggering: one priest with over 100 victims, for example, abused all seven of one parishioner’s sons and nephews, including a boy only four years old.
Numerous studies indicate that one out of every three girls and one in six boys in the United States are sexually abused before they reach the age of 18. These figures exclude the many victims who do not remember or cannot disclose. The extent of child sexual abuse in our country is clearly far greater than current research indicates.
It is in this grim context that we must consider the victims of the Second Mile and the possibility that there are others who have not come forward. Survivors number in the millions and are all around us.
Survivors are our relatives, friends, partners and colleagues. Suicide rates among them are far higher than the national average, as are trends for substance abuse, gang-related crime, prostitution and reckless behaviors that endanger themselves and others.
Survivors are more likely to cut short their education or underachieve academically and in employment for reasons unrelated to their ability; they can find it difficult to cope with intimate relationships, and marriages more frequently end in divorce.
The importance of open dialogue
To ask what we can do to support Sandusky’s victims is to ask how we can contribute to the larger battle against childhood sexual abuse. More appropriately, what must we do? With great crisis comes great opportunity, and this holds true not only among the professionals who support sexual abuse survivors in police investigations, the judicial process and healing therapy, but among the general public as well.
One of the most important ways in which the public can respond is to avoid the usual discomfort and reticence that obstruct any conversation about sexual abuse. Discussion often means hearing about acts of unimaginable evil and cruelty, but silence and avoidance do not change the realities of child abuse. Reticence and denial discourage survivors from disclosing abuse and seeking help, and ultimately preserve the secrecy that allows it to continue.
The case of Sandusky, who was nothing if not brazen, illustrates this. He abused boys for as long as they were accessible, sometimes for years, molesting them in their schools, on the Penn State campus, at his own home, in moving cars, in hotel rooms in Pennsylvania and on bowl game trips elsewhere in the country. One of his preferred venues was the coaches’ showers at the Lasch Building on campus, where discovery could occur at any moment. Sandusky gave extravagant presents, pursued grabby and aggressive physical contact with the boys, complained, sulked and badgered them with calls and messages when they tried to avoid him.
In hindsight there were clearly “more red flags than you could count,” as Louis Freeh put it in the Freeh Report, but most were ignored or trivialized.
How could all this happen without provoking enough alarm to make a difference? Some of the muted response suggests a cover-up, but a large part of it reflects the widespread lack of public awareness of sexual abuse issues – not just at Penn State, but everywhere in our country.
And the problem extends beyond lack of awareness of abusers to a corresponding ignorance of how abuse affects victims. To a frightened child who thinks, as most do, that the abuse is his own fault and that no one will believe him if he tells, the most urgent priority in his life is to hide what is happening to him. As the abuse goes unnoticed, his situation seems to him more hopeless and confusing.
Much of this occurs in front of adults in a position to help, but even the most obvious warning signs can be missed. Victim 4 began to hide in closets when Sandusky visited, yet these visits were allowed to continue.
The reality is that, unless we are aware, we will not recognize the import of what we see. This is a common theme among parents of sexually abused children, who often react to disclosure with shock and ask, “How could I not have known?”
This unawareness and reluctance to engage in dialogue that could rectify trauma are frequently noted by survivors, who recall how “invisible” they felt as abused children. The abuser seemed all-powerful, his conduct beyond reproach and his offenses beyond detection. It felt like no one wanted to know, and if the boy did the one thing he could do to protect himself – tell someone – who would believe him?
Abusers exploit these feelings with threats and subtle innuendos of looming rejection and catastrophic harm. I was told, for example, that if my father ever found out, he would send me to the local orphanage where all bad boys go. Sandusky threatened to send Victim 4 home in disgrace from the Alamo Bowl when he resisted his advances. It’s hardly surprising, then, that Sandusky’s victims, like most others, remained silent.
The example of Sandusky also alerts us to the fact that very few perpetrators are strangers, an image perpetuated by such high-profile abduction cases as those of Shawn Hornbeck and Elizabeth Smart in 2002. Focusing on “stranger danger” obfuscates the fact that most abused children are victimized by someone they know and trust; fewer than 10% of perpetrators are strangers to their victims. An abuser can be anyone from any walk of life. As the Sandusky case demonstrates, a life full of apparently worthy deeds can cover a determined molester.
Cases of childhood sexual abuse confront us with situations in which perpetrators and victims routinely remain invisible unless observers are aware of the warning signs. It’s clearly vital that every institution or group involved with children has policies in place to react quickly and effectively to protect potential victims. Programs must focus not only on the recognition of signs, but on the reporting procedure. Functionaries at all levels need clear guidance on their personal responsibility during a questionable situation. The Freeh Report criticized Penn State for the overwhelming authority of “football culture,” but unless trained to do otherwise, all will act in accordance with their own perceptions of their place in the culture with which they identify.
As the Sandusky case shows, the mere existence of state and federal laws is not enough. Failure to report occurred not only at the higher levels, but all through the system—much of this because so many who could have intervened had never heard of mandatory reporting or disclosure regulations such as those of the Clery Act.
Mandatory reporting protocols vary among jurisdictions and can be so impenetrable that multi-day seminars are convened to clarify them. As a result, the answer to what should be done and by whom can collapse into confusion when an actual problem arises.
This significantly impacts survivors, who as children had to cope with situations in which they were defenseless and deprived of hope.
When later on in life they see other children enduring the same things that were done to them, it can feel like the situation is hopeless and that nothing will ever change. Recovery, a daunting challenge in any case, becomes especially difficult when the world looks so bleak as this.
Where to go from here?
As awareness and engagement increase, more survivors of childhood sexual abuse are encouraged to disclose and seek support. One of the most positive statements emerging from the Sandusky case came in Attorney General Linda Kelly’s press statement after the verdicts were announced:
“One of the recurring themes of the witnesses’ testimony, which came from the voices of the victims themselves in this case, was: Who would believe a kid? And the answer to the question is: We here in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, would believe a kid. And I think that I speak not only for my own agency, but for law enforcement across the country, when I say: We would believe a kid.”
This is a powerful message to a survivor. Everything the abuser says and does makes the victim feel that if he tells, no one will believe him. Why would they? The abuser is respected, his crimes are unseen and the victim himself can hardly believe what is happening to him. The moment of disclosure involves a leap of faith. Assurances that he is believed open the way for further disclosures and facilitate the process of healing. If the survivor’s disclosure is met with doubts and denials he is likely to retreat into isolation, perhaps for years or even decades.
It is equally important that victims – Sandusky’s and all others – be assured that they are not to blame for what was done to them. A sexually abused child is most likely to conclude that the shame and guilt he feels reflect his own worthlessness and weakness. Survivors need to know that nothing they ever said or did, or complied with, could make the abuse their fault. This nurtures a foundation upon which recovery can be built.
One of the most decisive moments in my own life came the day my father said to me, “Larry, this was not your fault.”
Finally, I want to raise the question on the fringes of any discussion of childhood sexual abuse: Why are pedophiles sexually attracted to children? Here our knowledge is secure. Abuse gives the perpetrator opportunities to wield power: to deceive, to emerge undetected from great risk-taking, to completely control a relationship and to oblige a defenseless child to submit to the most extreme violations of body and soul.
This terrible truth can help us once we understand it. Victims of sexual abuse need to know that the powerlessness they remember from their childhood was real but not their fault. Once they disclose the abuse, they will be believed and supported without judgment.
The larger challenge then becomes clear: to break the power of abusers, who use secrecy and lies to prey on the young, and at the same time to empower institutions and families to protect children, to encourage victims to disclose and seek the support they deserve and to facilitate their recovery as they emerge from isolation and attempt to trust again. As an aware and committed community we will be able to respond decisively when a survivor steps forward to declare, as one young man said to me:
“I am the captain of my own ship.”