Letter

Listen to the survivors

Dear healthmatters — We were astonished and outraged to read David Seedhouse’s views on the choices confronting a society in which child abuse takes place (Learn the lessons of 1984, issue 7).

Though we acknowledge that children are emotionally damaged by many different abuses of parental power, we would not agree that all of these can be conflated with the experience of child sexual abuse. Parental possessiveness, restriction of young people’s freedom to develop socially, and interference with career choices (which the writer instances as abuses that could suggest a compulsory care order) are indeed all important issues of children’s rights.

Yet to suggest that child sexual abuse is treated differently (and children are more protected) only because the abuse can sometimes be proved on medical examination shows a total ignorance of the issues facing children who have been raped or sexually assaulted, and those who work to protect them. The majority of sexually abused children do not display symptoms that can be found on physical examination, or not at the time of examination. Furthermore, many are not listened to or believed at all. Seedhouse’s contrast of sexual abuse with emotional damage is a false and cruel contrast. ‘An emotionally deprived child is as wounded as one with damaged genitals,’ he says. Does he really believe that the girl who has been regularly raped by her father, is suffering only from ‘damaged genitals’ in contrast with an emotional wound?

Seedhouse’s two concluding options that either all children damaged by parents in any way should be taken into care, or that none should be removed but rather left to ‘adapt as best they can’, strikes us as bizarre and irresponsible in the extreme. This crude conclusion ignores the particular needs and circumstances of individual children. He focuses on the removal of abused children rather than on the removal of the abuser.

There are cogent reasons why voluntary agencies and statutory services have followed feminists in mobilising around child sexual abuse in the way they have (albeit they do not have adequate resources to fully protect children). Many volunteers, carers and professionals have listened to survivors of child sexual abuse. It would seem that David Seedhouse has not.