How do we protect our children without demonising men?

We have been hurting children since the year dot.

But over the past hundred years or so, the child protection movement has gained momentum and child abuse is now regarded as a major social problem. I’m interested in examining some current issues in child protection, including some unintended consequences of men becoming more involved with their children. I’m also intrigued by the current hysteria about paedophilia and wonder if there is a saner, more commonsense way we can deal with child sexual abuse.

Many years ago, I was a counsellor and I worked with adults and children who had been harmed, usually by being sexually abused. At that time, we chanted the mantra ‘the only taboo about having sex with children is talking about it, not doing it’. I was perplexed to find that the Stranger Danger campaigns that I grew up with were still popular, since I knew that the danger to children was overwhelmingly from within the family, not outside it, and usually from trusted men in children’s lives. Interestingly, it is only in recent years that any research has been done to examine women as perpetrators of sexual abuse. Denial was, and is, the order of the day, since to think otherwise is to challenge the dominant paradigm of explaining family violence as a symptom of patriarchy. More on that later.

It is a known fact that severe physical and sexual abuse is relatively uncommon. More common, and according to some experts, far more damaging in the long term, is emotional abuse and neglect, but violence and sex are seductive, and tend to attract public attention. The irony of the media feeding the ‘voyeurism and vengeance’ frenzy is that the usual government knee-jerk reaction results in fewer child abuse prevention programs. The money for high-profile investigative programs has to come from somewhere, and it’s usually from the bucket reserved for long-term, preventative approaches. But then, the long-term approach has never been a particularly saleable product to the electorate.

I believe that most media coverage of child abuse tends to be superficial, inflammatory and misleading, which in turn perpetuates some convenient myths about the real source of risk. Could it be that scandal and gore sells papers and advertising space on TV and radio?

To give you a potted history of the modern occurrence of child abuse:

Dorothy Scott, an Australian researcher and writer, asserts that there have been two major waves of what she terms "the child rescue movement".

The first wave occurred in the late nineteenth century, which also saw the emergence of the Freudian school and the beginnings of a new framework for understanding and interpreting human behaviour. Around the same time, Durkheim was proposing that deviance served an important social function. That is, the denunciation of deviance allowed society to define the boundaries of normative behaviour. A bit like the proposition that we must have evil in order to recognise good.

Most literature focuses on the second wave, with the ‘rediscovery’ of child abuse in 1962 via Henry Kempe’s article in the Journal of the American Medical Association on ‘battered babies’. Most researchers concur that this ‘rediscovery’ paralleled a couple of major social changes, including the kernel of the women’s liberation movement.

David Finkelhor, an American researcher, suggests that this wave of social change led to a more public scrutiny of family life. The abuse was there, but had been obscured by a curtain of privacy. As more women entered the workforce and became newly independent, options opened up for women (and children) who had previously suffered in relative silence. Women started to speak up about their own experiences and a new class of health, welfare and education professional was there to hear them and to validate what they were saying.

This resulted in a fundamental change in the way we viewed children and paved the way for state intervention, and the current array of programs reflect that change in political will.

One of the more recent, and potentially more challenging child abuse prevention strategies, is about teaching children self-protective behaviours. Imported from the United States a few years ago, it is now an important tool in many Australian prevention programs. Essentially, it aims to define ‘good’ and ‘bad’ touching, and this process is undertaken with children and their parents. I say it is potentially challenging because it moves beyond the Stranger Danger paradigm to a concept that recognises that people who care for children can also hurt them. This approach teaches children that even people who are close to them, including parents, relatives and carers, are capable of harm. It also confirms that children have the right to say ‘no’ – in this case to inappropriate touches.

The first challenge involves a fundamental shift in our thinking. It requires us to acknowledge that we are all potentially capable of inflicting serious hurt. The convenient thing about the stranger model is that it externalises responsibility. It makes it easy for us to point the finger at the mad, bad and dangerous.

I don’t wish to downplay the real and serious threat that paedophiles pose. I do, however, object to the simplistic portrayal of child sexual abuse in the media. I would prefer to see the howls of moral indignation replaced by an accurate understanding of the complexities and subtleties of the issue.

Consider the recent paedophile ‘outings’ in the UK. Not only do we have the media trumpeting their disgust and identifying known paedophiles under the protection of "the public’s right to know", but we also have really dumb journalists who don’t know the difference between a paedophile and a paediatrician. It’s a hell of a lot easier to daub paint on doors than it is to take either individual or collective responsibility for doing nothing when the next-door neighbour’s child is sexually abused by his or her father, step-father, uncle or grandfather. Then, it’s a case of ‘not my business’ or ‘not my problem’. And we still haven’t come to terms with the fact that it happens in even the most respectable families.

Unfortunately, taking responsibility requires effort. For me, it means that I have to recognise the tensions inherent in holding two potentially conflicting values. How do I balance my belief in personal liberty and the right to privacy with the belief that in some instances, I have the responsibility to intrude into the personal lives of others? Where is the line drawn? Is that line static, or does it move? The answers for me are: "It changes all the time and I have to make the effort to evaluate every new instance."

The second challenge lies in the way we currently view men. As a card-carrying feminist (which allows me to say these things), I think that we women have to make up our minds. Do we really want men to be active, loving parents to their children? Is it OK for a man to do some things, but not others? I think that we are giving men mixed messages. The first is about being involved with children. The second is about getting close, but not too close.

Recent times have seen an explosion in the numbers of separated or divorced dads who intend to be a presence in their children’s lives. Some of those are also very uneasy men who fear the spectre of allegations of abuse. The threat may be real or imagined, but the result is the same. They keep their distance, just to be on the safe side. And is this what we worked so hard for? Why is it OK for a woman to groom her children, to brush hair and take the fluff out of belly buttons, but not OK for a man to do the same thing?

I think the problem stems from the myth that only men are capable of inflicting sexual harm. Our illusions were shattered in the 60s when we had to come to terms with the fact that some women hurt their children. They burned their children with cigarettes and hot irons. They hit them with belt buckles. And they still do.

How could a good woman hurt her children? Easy, and for a number of reasons that have to do with power, economics and more often, personal experience as a victim.

Maybe it’s time to shatter our illusions again. Women, just like men, have sexually abused children. Social researchers are cautiously examining the phenomenon, and, as Renee Koonin suggested back in 1995, child sexual abuse by women is the last taboo.

Yes, it’s a fact that far more men than women sexually abuse children. But do we have to demonise them all? Scapegoating and stereotyping are easy, and very convenient.

The harder path, if we have the will, isn’t paved with yellow bricks and it isn’t black and white either. That path is innumerable shades of grey.