SEARCHING FOR HOPE

Today I am reading about childhood sexual abuse and thinking about hope. Rachel and I are preparing to offer a hope series for parents of sexually abused children. We will need to be compassionate. We will need to know where our own hope can be found. So far the hunt for hope resources is still on. The question I would like to be addressing is this: How can I care about a child who has been sexually abused and be hopeful at the same time?

So far I have found some things. I’ve found stories written by survivors. Several of them mention hope. But of course, they talk a lot about the trauma and how hard they had to work to get past it. That’s what makes their stories notable. But I don’t feel very hopeful saying: it can be overcome but the child will have to work really, really hard. So I continue the search.

There are statistics. On the most thorough pages there are a lot of disqualifiers. Childhood sexual abuse is not measured by consistent standards. Different studies get different numbers. The thorough pages list all the numbers. Then I notice that the less thorough websites tend to quote the highest numbers, without quoting the smaller numbers. And I wonder why anyone would choose to discredit the smaller numbers by not mentioning them.

I go to the website of the American Psychological association. It carries a long list of bad effects childhood sexual abuse has on children. Then it says: In short, the ill effects of child sexual abuse are wide ranging. There is no one set of symptoms or outcomes that victims experience. Some children even
report little or no psychological distress from the abuse, but these children may be either afraid to express their true emotions or may be denying their
feelings as a coping mechanism. Other children may have what is called "sleeper effects." They may experience no harm in the short run, but suffer serious
problems later in life.”” (http://www.apa.org/releases/sexabuse/effects.html).

This is where I lose my temper. What I read here is that if a child reports no ill effects, we psychologists don’t believe him or her. We say the child is probably in denial, and will likely experience bad effects later.

What I see here is a media approach that has failed to attend to any evidence that would give us hope. If I am to run a hope group for parents of children who have been sexually abused I will need to believe that their children will likely be okay. It would be nice to have the evidence, but we don’t hear much from people who experienced sexual abuse and then moved on. Why would they tell us they are okay? They have, after all, moved on. I will also need to believe that even if they told us they were okay, we professionals may choose to disbelieve them, expecting them to fall apart later. It sounds a little like the olden days, where it is said that children who told stories of sexual abuse were not believed.

If I am to run a hope group, then I will need to believe that children of this generation are better off than those in the past, because our society has made a commitment to hearing their stories and setting up systems to protect them. Hopefully, in the next generation of adults, today’s children will be less traumatized than their predecessors. Hopefully they will tell the stories of how our openness helped them get past their trauma. May we be open to hope. That’s my hope.