Q: Our five-year-old son was recently sexually molested by his cousin. How do we help our boy?
A: These are clearly difficult times for you and your family. I do not know if it helps to know this, but sexual abuse of children is far more common than is often known. Our best guesstimates are that one in four young girls has been sexually abused as has one in six young boys.
More than 80 percent of the perpetrators of sexual abuse are known to the family, many of whom are related to their victims. The fear of strangers in the community is warranted but we need to be more mindful of our own families. Too many uncles, cousins and close family friends have been identified as abusers for any of us to take our family’s safety systems for granted.
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As discouraging as it is to know that abuse is so common, it is also somewhat heartening to know that many families find their way through the trauma of abuse. It can be worked out.
The process goes something like this. Number one is to report the incident to the police. You have already done so.
Apart from whatever clarifications the police need to know about your family and your son’s incident, they are most likely to leave you alone while they work through their investigation and consider whether charges will be laid. This is their job. They do it well.
Your task is to worry about your son, not about what the police may be doing. They will call you if they need you to help them.
Your next task is to sign off from your extended family, at least for a while. Protecting your son is far more important.
Any contact with anyone from your family is likely to be limited to visits to your home, not theirs, and always under your watchful supervision. If nothing else, that sends a message to your son that he is being protected.
Then there is you. I will not pretend to understand all the powerful emotions confronting you, but my guess is that your feelings of guilt and anger, helplessness, shame, doubt, betrayal and inadequacy are more than you can resolve on your own.
We have good counsellors in our mental health systems. Use them, and get your husband to also use them.
The two of you are going to think things out more clearly once you start counselling and resolving your emotions. Seeing things clearly is to everyone’s advantage.
Finally, there is your son. He needs you to love him, to protect him and to discipline him.
He needs you to listen to him and he needs to know that his mom and dad are going to get him to bed on time no matter what, that his kitchen is always loaded with nutritious foods and that being a victim does not give him permission to wander off from his daily routines.
In fact, he needs a super mom and a super dad and if he gets both, the odds are good that he will emerge from this with little or no emotional scar tissue.
Jacklin Andrews is a family counsellor from Saskatchewan. Contact: jandrews@producer.com.
