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| By Woodrow J. Hinton |
A small boy carefully folds paper into a plane. He makes a family of planes. Then he names each one. On the planes that need some comforting, he sticks Band-Aids. On other planes that have made him mad, he puts stickers of bees.
This is one way that A Voice helps children process their sexual abuse. A program of the Center for Children and Families, A Voice consists of five therapists helping about 400 kids and their families cope with sexual abuse every year.
"We've seen them a little younger than that, but when you're working with a 2-year-old, you have to go through their caretakers a little bit," says Beth Boyd, the program's manager for A Voice.
Many of the young clients are referred to A Voice by the hotline 241-KIDS or by police. Others come from Children's Hospital or schools. Most go first through the Mayerson Center for Safe and Healthy Children for a forensic interview to substantiate abuse.
Once kids enter A Voice, therapists determine the best course of action: individual therapy, therapy with non-offending family members or group therapy.
'They come running'
The first step is determining the trauma experienced by a sexually abused child. It's more complex than one might guess.
In fact, violence and penetration are only two of nearly a dozen variables that determine how traumatic sexual abuse will be to a child. Other factors include the power differential between the child and the abuser, the previous relationship between the two and how much trust was there to betray, how long the abuse went on, the child's level of functioning before the abuse began and how the abuse comes to light.
One factor is common to all sexual abuse.
"There's always trickery," Boyd says.
A huge variable affecting the level of trauma is whether or not the child is believed when she tells of the abuse.
"Even now we get cases where children have told a parent and they don't get responded to," Boyd says. "All that creates a sense of shame and secrecy and isolation."
Even when children are taken seriously, that shame, secrecy and isolation nearly always result from sexual abuse. That's why combining group therapy with individual therapy is such effective treatment, Boyd says.
"Sitting in a room with other children who have experienced similar things really helps to break up that sense of isolation and helps children feel less shame about what has happened to them," Boyd says.
The kids who enter bedraggled and upset the first week of group therapy are bounding into the room by the third week, she says.
"They come running in the door because they feel such relief that here are kids that have gone through the same thing," she says.
If the abuse was a one-time event and the child immediately told someone who believed her, she might not even need much therapy. In any case, the more the family is involved the better the child will do, according to Boyd.
"The children are very aware that the parents are making a real commitment to their recovery," she says. "It really gives the child a sense of support."
'Don't talk about it'
What many don't realize is that sexual abuse isn't limited to rape or penetration.
"When you're a 12-year-old and your stepfather is looking at you in a leering kind of way, it's not comfortable," Boyd says. "You are being looked at as a sexual object, and it's not appropriate."
Sexual abuse can be anything that takes away from a child the natural process of discovering her sexuality on her own.
A lot of the kids Boyd sees have grown up in overly sexualized environments where children are allowed to watch adults having sex -- onscreen, in magazines or even in the flesh.
"It seems like we have more and more kids who are having sexual behavior problems, who are acting out sexually," Boyd says.
Even though there are many ways for a child to be damaged, Boyd is emphatic in saying recovery is possible.
"Does it ever go away completely?" she says. "No. (But) you can resolve it in a way that doesn't have to affect your life. I truly believe that."
At least there exist programs that address children's sexual abuse. Forty years ago nothing like A Voice existed, Boyd says.
Children who don't properly process their abuse while still children often grow into adults who suffer depression, low self-esteem, problems with sexuality and difficulty trusting.
Some kids deal with the trauma by dissociating, or letting their minds drift off to a safer place. Then, if they remember the incident at all, it's often remembered in a detached way, as if the victim was watching from the ceiling as the abuse happened to someone else.
Without therapy, such dissociative symptoms can linger into adulthood, Boyd says.
Sexual abuse is more common than many realize.
"When you sit in a room with a group of women and look around, one out of three has been sexually abused," Boyd says.
In a roomful of men, the probability is one in every six or seven.
"If this has happened to so many people, where are they?" she says. "So many people don't talk about it."
But talking about it makes all the difference. That's why groups such as A Voice are important.
"So many of our kids are amazingly resilient," Boyd says. "Horrible, horrible things maybe have happened to them, but they're OK."
In addition to making paper planes, therapists sometimes help children write a little book. The theme is "the thing that happened to me."
"Pretty soon you have a book that has a beginning, a middle and an end," Boyd says. "And the end is, 'Now I'm going to go on with my life.' "
To contact A Voice, call 513-221-4673. A 2.5-mile race May 14 at Sharon Woods Lake benefits A Voice. For more information, call 513-771-2230.
