Taboo prevents families acting on child-abuser

`We were only open about a year when the first cases of child abuse starting coming in, and today the majority of people coming in here are working with something that happened them in the past. About 70 per cent are survivors of past abuse, and about 30 per cent are working with recent rape or rape as an adult."

The director of Cork Rape Crisis Centre, Ms Mary Crilly, is talking about how the work of the centre has changed since it opened in 1983. At that time, although cases of child sex abuse were being reported, the great torrent of abuse had still to burst through the dam of reserve and disbelief that such things could happen.

Until five years ago Ms Crilly found that the majority of victims of sex abuse coming to the centre were reporting abuse that had happened 20 or 30 years ago. Today she finds that they are coming to report abuse that happened 10 years before or less.

"I find that most people, if they survive about 20 years, try to survive another 20 without going anywhere, without opening up, and there is a fear that if you start talking about it, you will make things worse. But usually there is something that drives them in, and often it's that they're concerned about possible future abuse.

"If their abuser was their father, for example, they might remove themselves from the family in a certain way, but now they find their own siblings might have children who are going into the family home, and that is often what pushes them because they can't live with the idea that he might do it again."

People who report that they have been abused are asked if the abuser still has access to children. If they do, it doesn't always mean reporting to the authorities but it could mean having to tell the family, which can be traumatic for the sex-abuse survivor.

"I find there is such a taboo about not disclosing that you have a child-abuser within your family that families often go to so much trouble to cover up and hide it. They might support the young girl or young fellow that's been abused but they will often say they don't want the rest of the family to know.

"So they will very often create a circle around this guy. They may even go to him and say `We want you to stop this', but maybe they won't tell his wife, or his elderly parents, because they're worried about the effect on them. They mightn't tell other people they know he is visiting or babysitting for.

"I often find the abuser has nothing at all to do to protect himself because so many people within families are jumping in to try to protect the secret, and in the end they're protecting him, though, of course, there are other cases where the survivor reports the abuse and the family end up totally divided by it."

Sometimes family members advise against survivors revisiting their abuse. They are told that it happened a long time ago, and family members appeal to them to leave it there. "People say `That happened a long time ago. Will you ever cop yourself on and just forget about it'," said Mary.

Sometimes there is a feeling that they are betraying the family member by talking about the abuse. The result is that the decision to contact the Cork Rape Crisis Centre can be traumatic. Often, they ring several times or walk past the door before they finally make contact.

"People coming to us would be at a stage in life where they just can't cope any more. You might have a woman who has memories and when her husband touches her something freezes in her body, or you might have a woman who is 50 or 60 and happily married, and something comes back to her.

"They feel as though their life is caving in or they're having so many nightmares or their husband has been really supportive but just can't take it any more. He may be dealing with it for a year or two and he says: `Where's this going to end. Will you go away and get some help'."

While women account for the vast majority of people coming to the centre - some 5-10 per cent are male - Mary Crilly expects the proportion of males to rise to 15-20 per cent within the next year or two. Most would be survivors of child sex abuse.

Counselling can last for two years. It may seem like a long time, but the sessions are just an hour a week, and often the trained counsellors take a number of weeks to establish a rapport before gradually moving to deal with the abuse.

"It has to be slow. We can't just jump in there, some people come in and are really ready and want to get through it as quickly as they can. But we try to pull them back a bit because they have to walk out of here and go back to their families and to work," said Ms Crilly.

"We don't want anybody coming out of here in a huge crisis, so it would be done in a slow way because you find that it isn't really in the hour that they're here that a lot of stuff is coming up for them. It could be between the two sessions when they're thinking about it."

The Cork Rape Crisis Centre currently has eight part-time paid counsellors. Until two years ago the centre worked with volunteer counsellors and, although they provided an excellent service, they were unable to cope with the increasing numbers. "Last year the waiting list was up to eight months - about 80 people - and I thought that was ridiculous, so I decided to take on qualified counsellors working with sexual abuse in the private sector who might like to do a day or two of paid work here."

IT currently costs about £200,000 a year to run the centre. Some £90,000 comes in grant-aid from the Southern Health Board, but the centre is dependent on fund-raising such as selling Christmas cards and women running sponsored mini-marathons to make up the shortfall.

"But the counsellors and everybody else still put in a fair amount of voluntary work," said Ms Crilly, who argues strongly that rape crisis centres should know in advance what they're going to get from health boards to allow them to plan their services.

"Every year I put in the same application form and back it up with proposals for what I'm going to do for next year. If we had money guaranteed every year, and could apply for money for whatever extra work we were going to do, that would allow us to plan our services for the year much better."

She estimates that the number attending the centre has increased by about 10 per cent on last year: the end-of-year totals for 1999 of 200 new cases and 2,000 phone calls have been almost reached already. "I can judge it by the waiting times. We have more counsellors but we still have people waiting six weeks."

Rape and sexual abuse straddle all social strata and all geographic areas, with the centre in Camden Place providing a service throughout the city and county. Ms Crilly is acutely aware of the difficulty rape and abuse survivors in rural areas can face in getting to the centre for counselling.

"There's no fee for counselling, but if people are in dire straits financially we often help with their travel expenses if they're coming in from outside the city. Ideally over the next few years I would like to have centres in a number of towns in the county.

"If we had outreach centres in, say, Mallow and maybe in Dunmanway or Bantry and somewhere in east Cork, even if it was just two days a week, it would make the service more accessible for people who might have difficulty getting to us at the moment."