There was a moment during the discussion of her book on the Late Late Show early this month, when Olive Travers, a senior clinical psychologist who works with victims of child sexual abuse and offenders, wanted to shout "stop". Gay Byrne had just asked an adult victim of child sexual abuse to describe what her abuser had done to her. "My children are watching," the woman said quietly, and Gay accepted that. But the very fact he would ask her is typical of the media's approach to abuse, Travers says. She would always discourage victims from divulging their experiences through the media, because the details are not important. Abuse is abuse. It's what we do to stop it that is important. As citizens and participants in the increasingly interactive media, we want to talk about being abused, we want to hear the horrid details, but we are unable to move beyond victimisation to a deeper understanding of why child sexual abuse occurs. Travers, who works in community care with the North Eastern Health Board, blames the women's movement for condemning victims to be victims forever by exaggerating the psychological damage caused by child sexual abuse. While some children are devastated and potentially irrecovably damaged (particularly if penetrative sex is involved) the majority can fully recover and forget. Are we ready to hear this?
There are media stars who have created identities for themselves based on being abused as children. Travers cites Sinead O'Connor, Roseanne Barr and LaToya Jackson as having "contributed to a disturbing trend which denigrates the anguish of those who suffer in silence. Instead of working through private grief, some personalities who go public on abuse use the myth of the permanently destroyed victim as an explanation for all that is wrong in their lives."
In Travers's exploration of the reality of sex offenders and their child victims, Behind the Silhouettes: Exploring the Myths of Child Sexual Abuse, written with Irish Times contributor Sylvia Thompson, she presents a convincing argument, in plain language, that politicians' cosmetic, quick-fix solutions to the problem of child sexual abuse are ineffectual because they are based on fundamental misunderstandings of who sex offenders are. Mandatory reporting, victim impact statements and offender registers have all been presented as magic wands for banishing and punishing the child sex abuser. But none of these is an effective solution, Travers argues. They are based on the myth that there is a clear-cut antagonism between evil sex fiends and irrevocably damaged victims. "This black-and-white version is dangerous to both the offenders and the victims and the families of both," she says.
Travers, much more than most, knows what she is talking about. Since 1985, she and her colleagues have worked with sex offenders and their victims in an innovative treatment programme which has been quietly developed by the North Eastern Health Board, in that gentle, Donegal way of letting things happen from the ground up, without the need for authoritarian pronouncements. "I did the book because I was so fed up over the past 10 years, feeling the frustration of seeing the media exposure of child sexual abuse reach a certain point and then go no further," she says.
"All the talk about sex abuse is in terms of anger, descriptions of sexual abuse and titillation. Graphic accounts of child sex abuse in newspaper court-reports, and probing interviews with victims in the broadcast media, amount to social pornography and are very damaging. We have to move beyond outrage." Travers, who was a teacher before retraining as a psychologist, is inspired by her own children to do the work she does. She and her husband, have four children aged 3 to 20.
"Having my children has made me appreciate childhood and given me an understanding of the dreadful things in some sex offenders' childhoods," she says. "Some have had no childhood as we understand it, which makes it very difficult for them to develop victim awareness and a sense of remorse, because they have become dehumanised. When you ask them to recall their childhoods, many have not a single good memory, other than what was on TV. Once you can help them to understand their own grief, which has come out of their own childhoods, they gain understanding of their victims' feelings."
We create monsters and use words such as "child molesters", "perverts" and "paedophiles" to distance ourselves from their actions and to protect ourselves from the reality that we all have within us the potential to abuse, Travers says. The media image of the child sex abuser is the satanic Marc Detroux, the twisted face of Father Brendan Smyth, the horrors of the McColgan case - but these are the exceptions. Adults who sexually abuse children are rarely monsters.
"Sex offenders are just like us. We all have the potential within us to abuse," Travers says. "All of us are abusive in our relationships to some degree. We lose our tempers with children, we use our power over them, we let our moods determine their treatment. That's everyday stuff. We all use some of the techniques of the sex offender in order to minimise the effects of the things we do that we know are wrong. We all use the technique of cognitive distortion, or twisted thinking, to make ourselves feel better." Most sex abusers - the kind you and your children are likely to meet - are gentle, kind and attractive to children, inspiring love and trust. Ninety-five per cent of children who are sexually abused, are abused by adults within the circle of family and friends. Some 36 per cent of child sex abusers are under age 18. Only 3 or 4 per cent of abusers are ever convicted. Most of them move among us undetected because they are so much a part of what we are.
Child sexual abuse is a close relationship gone wrong. One of the best-kept secrets of parenthood, says Travers, is that children are sensual creatures. As they grow, they can be playfully seductive. The vast majority of adults love and appreciate these sensual qualities, but know where the boundaries are. Adult sex offenders breach these boundaries.
A minority of offenders are paedophiles who are sexually aroused only by children and cannot comprehend that sex with children is wrong and ingeniously justify their sexual activities through twisted thinking. But the vast majority of offenders are not paedophiles; they can be aroused by normal, adult, sexual activity and they are able to understand what they are doing is wrong, but they have become sexually abusive of children through complex social and psychological circumstances. One common type of offender is the socially insecure, isolated and lonely young man who lives with his mother and has few friends, none of them women. Within his family circle there are children - perhaps young cousins, nieces or nephews - with whom he feels comfortable. He loves them and because they love to see him, they jump on his lap and cuddle him, while he reciprocates by bringing them sweets and playing games.
Then, he unintentionally becomes aroused while in playful, physical contact with a child. This is the first closeness he has experienced with another human being. Nothing may come of it, but if he begins to sexually fantasise about the child while masturbating, he has reached a point of no return. From there, it is a slippery slope to habitual abuse of the child. In her work with sex offenders, Travers has found the majority of sex offenders, in treatment, either totally remorseful, or capable of becoming so during treatment.
She believes we need to deal with child sexual abuse the way we do alcoholism - everywhere an alcoholic looks, there are opportunities for treatment. The same, she says, should be true for child sexual abusers, who should have somewhere to turn when they realise they have a problem. Mandatory reporting ignores the fact that an abuser who is willing to admit he or she is behaving wrongly may be more effectively treated if he or she is referred to a treatment programme rather than the courts. We are doing no good for children by stating that we want to prevent child abuse, while also refusing to provide treatment programmes for offenders, Travers says.
She rejects claims by some people working with sex offenders that the majority of sex offenders will be unable to resist re-offending, even if they receive treatment, citing research which proves otherwise. An exception is paedophiles, because of their fixation on children and their inability to see their actions as wrong: few would argue that these unapologetic abusers should be removed from any chance of contact with children. But most child sex abusers are not paedophiles. Rather, they are "transitional" offenders who need understanding and help.
The call for a sex-offender register overlooks the fact that the abuser is unlikely to be the stranger in the van with the English registration plate. The offender is likely to be known to the community already (it is your husband, brother or son - or, in rarer cases, your mother, sister or aunt). All the child victim wants, usually, is an acknowledgment, an apology and a guarantee that the abuser will never hurt another child, a goal best achieved through rehabilitation. Sexual abuse involving penetration is devastating no matter what the context. But where it is absent, the psychological damage to an abused child is usually caused by the betrayal of trust, rather than by the physical act of abuse.
When the adult behaves sexually towards them, many children naturally think this is what adults do. Children who lack parental love and attention may be delighted to feel what they perceive as the abuser's devotion. Children, especially boys, may enjoy "dirty talk" when pulled into the sexual realm by an abusive adult. If abused by an older woman, they may feel they are gaining social status.
But when children become aroused, they are doing so because they are being manipulated to react in that way, not because they enjoy sexual activity, which they are incapable of as children. This can lead to shame and, with boys abused by men, the fear of being seen as homosexual. The psychological damage occurs when the child realises he or she has been used as a sexual object by a trusted, false "friend" and thus betrayed.
"Abuse which is mild - if you can use the term - and does not involve penetration, is not the fundamental cause of the child's distress," Travers believes. Rather, the emotional fall-out depends on the context of the child's overall life. A neglected child will be more affected by the sexual abuse than a child who is emotionally secure.
Victim impact reports can be misleading, Travers says, because they freeze the victim's emotional state at the point of crisis and do not differentiate between the problems created by the abuse, and those created by the child's social circumstances. The timing of the report, she observes, makes it unreliable. A victim may be devastated for a while, but may soon recover and be restored to normal emotional and social functioning. Sentencing and treatment should be based not on the victim's state of mind at one particular point, but on the perpetrator's actions, she argues. She also insists newspaper reports of child sexual abuse cases can inflict real pain on offenders' families and on victims and their families. "How would you feel if The Irish Times regarded your sexual abuse as worth four lines, and another person's as worth two pages?" she asks.
After hearing or reading melodramatic portrayals of the harm wrought by sexual abuse, victims are likely to feel there is more wrong with them than they thought. Ordinary people may become trapped in the role of professional "survivor". Travers passionately believes we should turn our backs on the victim culture and instead offer hope by emphasising victims' resilience and potential to recover fully. And rather than focus on retribution, we should aim for rehabilitation of sex offenders. Offering therapy to sex offenders is probably the most hopeful expression that we can offer the victims themselves. Because making the abuse stop is what victims really want.
Behind the Silhouettes: Exploring the Myths of Child Sexual Abuse by Olive Travers, with Sylvia Thompson, is published by Blackstaff, price £10.99.