9781422276068

Chapter 1

Understanding Child Sexual Abuse

Child abuse comes in many forms. What they all have in common is that abusers take advantage of the power imbalance between adults and kids. That’s particularly disturbing when you realize that obedience to authority figures is precisely how we define a “good” or “well-behaved” child. Society expects children to “do as they’re told,” and meanwhile abusers exploit that fact to their own, highly damaging ends. Physical abuse is harmful in the most obvious sense, but all forms of child abuse are damaging in less visible ways. The most important thing to remember is that the abuse is never, ever the child’s fault. That may seem so obvious as to not be worth mentioning. But in fact, it’s very common for abusers to say things along the lines of, “you made me do this,” or “you wanted this,” or “if you had done X or Y, this wouldn’t have happened.” Worse still, kids often take adults at their word — assuming that, indeed, they did something to “cause” the abuse to happen. This is completely wrong. A misbehaving child, for example, has not “earned” or “asked for” mistreatment. The same goes for sexual abuse — nothing the child did or said is a justification for the adult’s behavior.

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