Children often don\'t have the verbal tools to tell adults about sexual abuse and this makes it difficult to punish abusers, says a University of Toronto researcher.

\"We need to impress upon policymakers and the legal profession that they can\'t expect children to testify about abuse in articulate, well-reasoned ways without inconsistencies,\" says Ramona Alaggia, a U of T professor of social work, whose research is published in the Nov. 2004 issue of Child Abuse and Neglect.

If the abuse happened when a child was very young, she adds, \"the ability to tell at what times the abuse occurred, how frequently it happened or even where it occurred is virtually impossible, because the trauma and the circumstances interfered with those details getting encoded.\"

Previous research has demonstrated that between 40 to 80 per cent of child sexual abuse victims don\'t disclose abuse before adulthood. Alaggia conducted in-depth interviews with 24 adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, both male and female, in the attempt to understand more about how, when and in what circumstances disclosure occurs.

\"We need to understand this so that prevention programs and interventions can be more effective,\" Alaggia says.

She discovered that more than half the disclosure patterns didn\'t fit previously established definitions. In many cases children and adolescents used behavioral cues to try to alert adults to problems. The behaviours they displayed included clinging, temper tantrums (youngsters) or angry outbursts (adolescents), withdrawal or avoiding being at home. \"It makes our jobs harder as adults to look at problematic behaviours and look for patterns, because some of these behaviours are also associated with particular stages of development,\" she said. \"We need to ask ourselves whether these behaviours are happening every night or, for example, only on the nights a certain babysitter is coming.\"

Alaggia also found that many victims delay disclosure until adulthood because they then have the independence, freedom from the perpetrator and potential support to cope with the emotional fallout.

\"Everybody discloses at their own pace and for different reasons,\" she says.

Alaggia also observed that it tended to be fear of complicity and blame, rather than physical threats - as the current literature sometimes states - that frightened victims into silence.

\"There were psychological and emotional mechanisms at play,\" she says. \"Often, the children were tricked into doing something that made them feel complicit, such as attending a concert they weren\'t supposed to attend or accepting a gift, and they felt they would be blamed as a result. Then, the bargaining started.\"

CONTACT:
Ramona Alaggia Elaine Smith
Faculty of Social Work U of T Public Affairs
416-978-1923 416-978-5949
ramona.alaggia@utoronto.ca
elaine.smith@utoronto.ca