‘I always swore I would kill anyone who touched my children, but when your child affects another of your children it is a different story . . . I thought my world had ended. It was like being in a black hole. I thought, am I not a good enough parent? It hit me like a hammer.”
They are the words of Trisha (not her real name). She is not the only Irish parent to discover their child has sexually abused another child. In this case, her teenage son had abused two siblings.
Trisha strongly recommends seeking professional intervention. Her family went to Children at Risk in Ireland (Cari) and then she and her son were referred to the Northside Inter-Agency Partnership (NIAP), in Dublin, which provides a community-based treatment programme to 13 to 18-year-olds who have sexually offended, and to their parents and carers.
NIAP is a member of the National Organisation for the Treatment of Abusers (Nota) whose annual international conference was held in Dublin last week.
Simon Hackett, professor of applied social sciences at Durham University in the UK and the incoming chairman of Nota, would like to see more public education about the true risks of sexual offending in the community.
“The indications are that children and young people perpetrate a significant minority of all sexual abuse, and that creates huge needs in terms of responses to them because not only are they perpetrating and victimising other people, they also have extensive needs themselves that need to be addressed,” Hackett says.
Hackett’s research, which he undertook with a colleague, looked at 700 young people who had offended and found that about 50 per cent had themselves been victims of trauma, including, but not confined to, sexual abuse.
“The presence of trauma appears to be one of the significant motivating factors for the development of abusive behaviour in childhood. This is not surprising because we know people are not born to be sexual offenders. I have seen many cases where children are being abused by someone and [simultaneously] acting out inappropriately, and in a sexually harmful way, to other people,” says Hackett.
“That should not really surprise us; we know from lots of other aspects of children’s lives that they take the models for their own behaviour from what they see and experience around them in terms of their families and broader environments,” he says.
Triggers
Joan Cherry, director of NIAP, says that for the 257 young people they have worked with in 23 years, the triggers for abuse varied and the organisation helps the young person to identify the triggers.
“For some it is a way of coping with feelings of rejection, abandonment, or to achieve intimacy; we know that only a very small percentage of those who abuse have a sexual interest in children. The majority of them engage in the behaviour for other reasons.”
She says it is important for parents to know that “it is possible to change this behaviour”.
“When parents and indeed young people understand that this is a behaviour that can change, it really does motivate them in terms of engaging with us so that they can understand the pathway that they went down and find a much healthier pathway in terms of managing their daily lives.”
Mary Tallon, a senior social worker with NIAP, says it is very important that adolescents who offend are viewed differently from adult sex offenders.
She says adolescents are viewed as being at a developmental stage until they are about 25 years old, in terms of neurological development, and NIAP runs a holistic programme involving the person, their families and carers, and “we do individual and family therapy, and that is also recognising the developmental stages of adolescents”.
Tallon says it is important not to demonise them for what they have done. “They are children first. They are young people with the very same interests, hobbies, behaviours. Like any other young person in the country they like their music, they are into social media; all the things we equate with young people.
“They are very different to adults in that they are open to change.”
Hackett agrees, saying that to demonise the young person can, in fact, contribute to some of the factors that led to the abuse occurring in the first place.
“There is a real difference between holding people to account for their behaviour and giving them an opportunity to take responsibility for it, and demonising them in a way that makes it less likely they can do the things that can make a positive difference in their future.”
One of the key factors in preventing them offending later in life is educational achievement, because school and qualifications give them “an opportunity to do meaningful work and activities in their life that give them a purpose that is not about abusing”.
“Some young people’s trajectory or pathway into abuse is through rejection, abuse, isolation. Lack of appropriate opportunity to make friends and develop sexual relationships with people of their own age can be implicit in the route into offending,” he says.
“If you demonise them, the consequence is they cannot complete their schooling because people are mistakenly thinking they are ‘high risk’ when they are not. It means that we are, ironically, contributing to some of the factors that may have led them to abuse in the first place,” he adds.
At NIAP, Cherry says they work towards all of their clients leading “a healthy, nonabusive lifestyle. We know, like any young person, if they are engaged in work and training; are not abusing drugs and alcohol; have group stable relationships; if they have an emotional confident, someone to turn to if they are in difficulties; if they have sports and hobbies; if they have these things, we know the chances of them engaging in any sort of criminal behaviour is less.”
‘Un-normal family’
It is some years since Trisha and her family completed their programmes with NIAP but it is very fresh in her mind. “We acted like a normal family but we were feeling like an un-normal family. I felt it was printed all over my face. I asked myself why didn’t we see the signs, but I wasn’t looking for anything like that. It felt like a death, because I was grieving inside for it to be the day before I knew.
“Your children are your children; I couldn’t love one more than the other. I could not kick him when he was down. He was my world and he broke my heart. It is 99 per cent repaired but I still have an ache in it for what he did.”
With NIAP, she says, “He learned a lot about himself that probably in a lifetime you would never think about. He is not a monster. He has to live with what he did.
“I don’t believe we would be the family unit we are today without CARI and NIAP. I feel what he learnt through NIAP has given him the tools to know when he needs to question himself, and I hope he never has to again.” See cari.ie; nota.co.uk
See childline.ie (24-hour helpline 1800 66 66 66); Rape Crisis Centre drcc.ie (24-hour helpline 1800 77 88 88)
