Training For Psychologists On Sexual Violence In Childhood
The notion that there are people in the world capable of sexually abusing a minor causes dismay, anger and discomfort in the population of the entire world. Still, ignorance regarding sexual abuse is evident even among mental health professionals. Things as basic as the psychological damage caused by abuse, the extent of the consequences or the composition and behavior of the families where the abuse occurs are unknown..
Because, despite the widespread belief in the lone wolf who kidnaps minors from the street, the majority of cases of sexual abuse in childhood occur in the family environment or within the home of the victims, with the perpetrator being the father. In most cases. Then we can also find that the perpetrator can be a brother, grandfather, uncle, and residually the mother or another female figure.
A percentage of these abuses are carried out by other minors. Now we are seeing how victims begin to talk about the abuse they suffered in sports, or religious, or recreational environments, such as summer camps, but The bulk of abuse occurs at home, and we haven’t started talking about that yet..
And since we are making concepts clear, let’s start with the concept of “sexual abuse” itself. As many victims tell us, using the term “abuse” is an understatement.
The most appropriate name to talk about this is Sexual Violence Against Children, VISCI.. Because despite the naive belief about the nature of sexual abuse of minors, in most cases we talk about rape. And we all understand that, for a minor, being raped by an adult (or by another larger minor) is extraordinarily violent, even when this abuse is occurring in a seductive way.
You only have to think about the difference in weight between the victim and the perpetrator, the threats against the life or integrity of siblings or the mother, and the deception and manipulation of the perception of what is happening to the minor. All these They are experiences of violence, and to affirm otherwise is to minimize some very serious events..
Using certain softer terms, such as “abuse” or considering that “if there was seduction, we cannot talk about violence” is to continue promoting a naive image of abuse. And we must understand the extent to which this harms minors in general, and not just those who have already been victims.
When the abuse occurs within the family nucleus, we find that these groups display specific behavioral traits, common to all these families, perfectly measurable and extrapolated to other families where the abuse occurs. The behavior of these clans is mafia-like, so we can classify these families as mafias.. These are not normal families. Their reality is far from what we all understand as normality, starting because in normal families there are no pedophiles who rape the minors in the family.
As in all mafias, each component has its particular role. The head of the clan, usually the father or grandfather, controls and sets the tone. And then, everyone else contributes in some way so that it can continue acting. These are complicit and cover-up characters.which are normally female figures, such as the mother or the victims themselves.
Something we frequently find is that many women who have been victims of sexual abuse in childhood end up getting involved in relationships with pedophiles and acting as their accomplices. Thus, and although it may seem counterintuitive, having been a victim of abuse is the most direct path to complicity in abuse. Compared to each victim capable of reporting what is happening in their home, we find about ten victims capable of attacking it to protect the pedophile.starting with the mother.
Logically, maternal complicity destroys the lives of children, and the fact that the mother herself is traumatized or has been a victim herself does not justify what she does. Some traumatized mothers report the abuse suffered by their children despite what has happened to them. It is this reaction of the mother that is most impactful in cases of domestic abuse, because she is quite far from what we understand in society that a mother should do when one of her children suffers harm.
Many female victims, faced with the mother’s rejection, will conform to what the family wants, and in their adulthood they will repeat their mother’s behavior automatically. The robotic behavior that we see in many of these women, who limit themselves to repeating what they have seen around them, has to do with the dissociation processes that traumatized people suffer.
The most serious thing about this behavior is that these women will expose their own children to abuse, very often at the hands of the same man who abused them. It is not unusual for these women to visit the pedophile at family gatherings, and to leave their children with those men, even though they already know that the person is a pedophile. And this is how sexual abuse passes from generation to generation through the maternal line.
The psychopathic personality of the perpetrators
With respect to the perpetrators (the pedophiles), according to the testimonies of the victims we verify that, in the majority of cases, they are people with psychopathic personality.
For the psychopath, the rest of us are not people, but only instruments that they use according to their convenience. Thus, when a pedophile realizes that it is difficult to obtain random child prey, what he often does is get married and have children so he can abuse them with impunity. In other cases, pedophiles seduce women who already have children, for example those who are divorced or separated, and end up using these women to abuse their children.
Forms of emotional manipulation
Pedophiles are usually very promiscuous and abuse as many children as they can. Normally the abuse is the same type for all its victims, but sometimes we find that they make exceptions for some children and treat them in a slightly different way.. This does not mean that these children are not abused; If they live in the pedophile’s environment they will end up suffering harm. What it means is that these children may be harmed less than others.
This type of different treatment can lead to conflicts between victims, something that only benefits the pedophile. The pedophile himself can generate conflicts between the different victims to entertain them while he abuses everyone. This is especially easy when it’s just girls.
Another typical behavior of the pedophile is trying to convince all his victims that each one is his favorite: “You are a special girl for me.” This is part of grooming and generates a very dangerous emotional dependence on the pedophile for life.
Many times the victims are surprised when they discover that they were not the only victims and that the father abused all their siblings and cousins and practically all the children in the neighborhood. It is usually shocking to discover to what extent the pedophile is promiscuous and to wake up from the absurd belief that you have been a special child for a rapist.
The need to train in this area
There are so many preconceived ideas and misinformation surrounding sexual abuse that it is terrifying for minors.. Not only do we neglect them when they are suffering abuse; We also abandon them later, in adulthood, when they try to explain to us what has happened to them and they encounter the absurd beliefs implanted in the heads of the supposed experts.
In that sense, we would never finish explaining the terrible damage that Freudian rhetoric has caused to victims, now and always. That minors seduce adults; that minors want to have sex with adults; that abuse does not cause harm to the minor, are all Freudian ideas, implanted (unfortunately) in the collective conscience, as unalterable and untouchable axioms in which many believe, despite the fact that common sense, good judgment and own experience Observations of children’s behavior tell us just the opposite.
Sexual abuse generates trauma because They are a highly traumatic experienceand therefore generate dissociation, as we have been explaining.
Dissociation can lead to different consequences such as psychogenic amnesia of the experience. And even if the victim does not dissociate the experience, her brain will not function correctly. Because of this, there are a myriad of diseases and disorders linked to trauma that victims of abuse (trauma in general) normally suffer from, and which usually carry throughout life, in the absence of specialists who know how to treat them.
For all these reasons, It is imperative that psychologists be well trained in trauma and sexual violence of all types, but particularly in child sexual abuse.. With that objective, at La Psicología Responde we have created a very complete course on abuse that no psychologist will want to miss.
