Abusing Not Only Children, but Also Science

Given the vested interests lurking all over the current medical landscape, it is no wonder that the scientific method is so often mauled a little in transit. Cases of data ignored or manipulated to serve an agenda are like muggings in a bad neighborhood: you hear about them all the time, but in fact relatively few are ever openly examined.

And so even readers with no personal or professional connection to the sexual abuse of children may be edified by “The Trauma Myth,” a short tale of one such particularly fraught episode.

For a graduate research project at Harvard in the mid-1990s, the psychologist Susan A. Clancy arranged to interview adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, expecting to confirm the conventional wisdom that the more traumatic the abuse had been, the more troubled an adult the child had become.

Dr. Clancy figured she knew what she would find: “Everything I knew dictated that the abuse should be a horrible experience, that the child should be traumatized at the time it was happening — overwhelmed with fear, shock, horror.”

But many carefully documented interviews revealed nothing of the sort. Commonly, the abuse had been confusing for the child but not traumatic in the usual sense of the word. Only when the child grew old enough to understand exactly what had happened — sometimes many years later — did the fear, shock and horror begin. And only at that point did the experience become traumatic and begin its well-known destructive process...

Even without all these practicalities, the moral of Dr. Clancy’s story is clear: science should represent truth, not wishful thinking. When good data fly in the face of beloved theory, the theory has to go...

One point that is really important in this area is that good support for the child and good justice are often not consistent.

Morally, adults want to punish adults who exploit children as part of their own sexual pattern. That means that the children have to understand the gravity of what has happened, and be able to carry on through multiple interactions with adults who are treating the experience as a very serious incident. This makes the incident a very serious one for the child, whether or not the child was showing any damage from the incident prior to interviews with parents, relatives, social workers, and police.

As a result, workers in this field often find children who (for example) saw a man urinating in public sustain more long-lasting damage than a child who had substantial sexual experience prior to puberty. This can happen for lots of reasons, but one is that situations sometimes changed without “the sysem” doing anything, and thus the child’s experience can be processed by the child’s own coping strategies— perhaps laughing with their friends about the exposed man in the expample above.

Unfortunately, attitudes of the adults and even adult “helpers”, can deepen the trauma. If the guy is arrested and needs to be prosecuted, then the laughing dismissal is now inappropriate and the child will have “trauma” that may require the assistance of a “counselor.” If the counselor is “thorough” and “gets at deeper material”, a passing joke becomes a serious incident.

As an exercise, I used to sometimes list a number of traumatic childhood incidents and ask students rank them in order of their likely impact on normal social development— death of a parent, amputation of a limb, witnessing a violent crime, divorce of the parents, being bullied at school, etc. Into the list I would introduce some incidents that are regarded a sexual abuse— seeing adults engaged in sexual activity, adults exposing themselves in the presence of the child, sexual relationship with a teacher, exploratory games with peers.

It was, and is clear to me that none of my students, and indeed few of my peers had any sort of clarity about the severity of impact of any of these possible childhood experiences. Many of my students came to realize that carrying a set of expectations about developmental impact into an interview with a child was damaging in itself.

I chose a trivial example above, but these concerns are even more troubling when we are talking about students who have had relationships with teachers, or cross sexual boundaries with peer-age relatives. The child often experiences a crush, or an adventure, or a fling until adults react with normal moral horror. “The system” can be horribly intrusive, and ultimately horribly damaging in such cases.

Pretty much all the professionals I ever worked with were determined to act as agents of justice as well as helping the child come through the experience undamaged. Often, however, we had to put up with the fact that our efforts to bring justice to abusing adults, created the damage that we most wanted to avoid.

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