The recent Bank Holiday Monday being slow on the home front, I found myself flicking between channels to see what was happening in the wider world. The big story in Britain was the market collapse on Wall Street, but there was also a story about how child abuse had been detected in British hospitals by the use of surveillance cameras.
The reports on both the 5.45 ITN news and the BBC news at 6 p.m. said the use of secret cameras in two hospitals had revealed that a number of pa rents abused their children when left alone with them in a room. Out of 39 cases, 38 had exposed abuse, ranging from thumping to attempted suffocation. In one case a young girl had her arm broken.
This story was even more interesting and disturbing than the initial reports were willing to al low. I watched about half-a-dozen bulletins that evening in which the hook of the story was that "parents" had being abusing their children in this way. It was after 11 p.m. on Newsnight when the full truth slipped out. I had noticed that all of the case histories related to mothers and had become increasingly curious as to why this was not being emphasised. Newsnight took the same approach as other programmes, but at one point the presenter made a reference to "these mothers", adding, as though by-the-way, that "these cases do mostly involve mothers".
If these abusers had been fathers, you can be certain that this would have been emphasised. Because the culprits were women, this fact was buried in the mix, the generic term "parents" being employed to conceal the most newsworthy aspect of the story. Why? Part of the reason is that child abuse by mothers is, as they say, the "final taboo". The idea of the sanctified mother is so pervasive in our societies that the notion of such abuse is unthinkable and because it is unthinkable, it is unsayable.
Inextricably allied to this syndrome is the degree of misandristic propaganda which has pervaded this subject in media, academic and social discourse, utterly contaminating society's attitudes to family issues by making it an article of faith that only occasional, extreme and therefore untypical cases of abuse involve mothers or other women.
THIS is a dangerous myth. A recent investigation by the Panorama team on BBC television revealed that perhaps a quarter of all sexual abuse of children in Britain is now carried out by women. But even more startling was the revelation that incidences of abuse by women tend to be far more sadistic than the generality of abuse by men.
Interestingly, as in the cases in the hospitals, technology is a big factor in the changing awareness, because many of the sex abusers are in the habit of videotaping their abuse for circulation to paedophile rings. In many instances, the discovery of these tapes has made inescapable what was previously unthinkable and opened up the possibility that many instances of alleged or suspected abuse in the past were not taken seriously because society's final taboo led to the dismissal of claims by children who said that they had been sadistically abused by their own mothers.
This puts in context the danger in the proposition that most abusers are male. This perception creates its own reality, because it means that social workers, police, lawyers, judges and other relevant authority figures have a resistance to the idea that women can be as abusive as men. This inevitably results in fewer investigations, fewer prosecutions and fewer convictions of women abusers, which in turn perpetuates the notion of child abuse as an almost exclusively male offence.
Inevitably, too, it means there is less likelihood that victims of abuse by females will bring their experience to public notice.
No statistics are available on the gender breakdown of abuse in Ireland, either for perpetrators or victims. The various health boards compile statistics from which other patterns can be established, but the official attitude seems to be that the issue of gender is not relevant.
But in the United States, for example, figures for child abuse show that when all categories of abuse are counted, the numbers of male and female perpetrators are about the same. In his book Not Guilty: In Defence of the Modern Man, David Thomas reproduces statistics prepared in the 1980s by the Americans Association for Protecting Children (AAPC), which challenge many of of our assumptions about child abuse.
Dividing abuse into categories ranging from sexual maltreatment to neglect to physical injury, the report for 1986 provides the following stark statistics: the average age of victims was 7.23 years; 53.5 per cent of the victims were female; 81 per cent of perpetrators were the parents of the abused children; the average age of the perpetrator was 31.7 years; the perpetrators were male in 46.7 per cent of cases.
Just think about that last statistic. That is how it was presented in the AAPC report, as though in an effort to play down the most staggering aspect of the AAPC's own findings: that 53.3 per cent of abusers that year were women.
An interesting point emerges from a comparison between the US figures and the available Irish statistics, indicating a cultural difference in the definitions of abuse. Whereas sexual abuse generally accounts for more than 40 per cent of the Irish figures, only about 15 per cent of overall abuse tends to come into this category in the US.
The figures for physical and emotional abuse are more or less similar, but there is a huge divergence under the heading of "neglect". In the US, more than 50 per cent of abuse comes under this heading; in Ireland, the figure is about 30 per cent. Since this is the category in which most abusers tend to be female, there is an obvious need to examine the reasons behind the discrepancy between the two cultures.
All of this tends to suggest that rather than being about the intrinsic badness of either gender, child abuse is a complex societal problem, which current bias in the system prevents us from seeing in its correct context. But even the modest proposal that men and women may be equal in guilt and virtue is for our society a quite staggering idea, because our culture of child-rearing is built on both the idea of the Good Mother and the myth of the Bad Man.
In family courts daily in this State, men are separated from their own children, sometimes permanently, on the basis of an assumption that mothers are more suitable than fathers as carers for children. This perception depends for much of its justification on the myth that men abuse children and women do not.
This view is held within the system by men and women with power of life and death over other human beings and decisions made on its flimsy basis affect issues of guardianship, access and custody of children on a daily basis in our courts. There can be little doubt that in addition to the obvious damage resulting from the loss of relationships between fathers and children, the consequences of this include an increased risk of abuse to some children.