Mothers Surviving Child Sexual Abuse

209 Pages·1992·0.64 MB·English

by  Carol-Ann Hooper

Mothers surviving child sexual abuse

A common reaction when people think themselves into the shoes of women
whose children have been sexually abused by their partners or anyone else is
to say instantly ‘I’d kill them’. It is an attempt to deflect pain with a simple
remedy, but faced with the reality women’s reactions are considerably more
complex. The central aim of Mothers Surviving Child Sexual Abuse is to
demonstrate this complexity, and to explore the way it is embedded in the
social relations within which child sexual abuse takes place.
Using in-depth interviews with women whose children have been sexually
abused, Carol-Ann Hooper investigates how they experience and cope with
the situation and the difficulties they face. How do they find out that sexual
abuse, nearly always surrounded in secrecy, has occurred? How do they decide
what action to take? How do they experience the responses of others—friends,
family, professionals? And how do they cope with their own feelings? The
answers to such questions are crucial both to the children’s safety and well-
being, and to successful professional intervention.
Mothers Surviving Child Sexual Abuse offers a new analysis of mothers’
reactions and responses and presents a fresh perspective on a difficult problem.
Informed by theory and research on other situations involving loss, secrecy
and moral dilemmas, as well as the rapidly accumulating knowledge of child
sexual abuse, the book will be immensely helpful to practitioners and policy-
makers involved in child protection, as well as to students and teachers in
Social Work, Social Policy and Women’s Studies.
Carol-Ann Hooper is Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of York.

Mothers surviving child
sexual abuse
Carol-Ann Hooper

Tavistock/Routledge
London and New York
First published in 1992
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall Inc.
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1992 Carol-Ann Hooper

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Hooper, Carol-Ann, 1956–
Mothers surviving child sexual abuse/Carol-Ann Hooper.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Sexually abused children—United States—Family relationships—Case studies. 2.
Incest victims—United States—Family relationships—Case studies. 3. Mothers—United
States—Attitudes—Case studies.
HV6570.7.H66 1992
362.7´63´0973–dc20 92–7607
CIP

ISBN 0–415–07187–9 (hbk)
0–415–07188–7 (pbk)
ISBN 0–203–21408–0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0–203–21420–X (Glassbook Format)
Contents

Acknowledgements vi
Introduction vii
1 Child sexual abuse and mothers: the issues 1
2 The study: aims and methods 20
3 Loss: the meaning of child sexual abuse to mothers 31
4 Finding out: the discovery process 53
5 Working it out: the context and process of response 80
6 Help-seeking decisions and experience of informal help 111
7 Statutory help and experience of intervention 132
8 Conclusions 164
Appendix: brief case details of women interviewed 175
Notes 179
Bibliography 183
Index 195
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank first and foremost the fifteen women who volunteered
to be interviewed for the study, and who took time and trouble to talk at
length about personal and painful aspects of their lives. I hope the book
achieves some of their hopes for it. I am grateful also to the Social Services
Departments who cooperated in helping me to contact women whose children
had been sexually abused, to the department which gave me access to its
files and to the individual social workers who took precious time out from
other demands to discuss their work with me.
I am indebted also to many others who have helped in various ways, with
encouragement, critical comments and practical help. The Economic and
Social Research Council provided funding for three years under the
Postgraduate Studentship Scheme. Jane Lewis gave extensive advice
throughout the research process and I am especially grateful to her. I thank
also Bob Coles, Tony Fowles, Liz Gifford, Tony Hooper, Liz Kelly, Amy
Manchershaw, Laura Markowe, Vivien Nice, Jennifer Peck, Janice Peggs,
Catherine Rees and Jane Ribbens for their contributions.
Introduction

A common reaction when people think themselves into the shoes of a woman
whose child has been sexually abused, by her partner or anyone else, is to say
instantly ‘I’d kill him’. It is both an attempt to deflect pain with a simple remedy
and a reflection of the dominant contemporary discourse of motherhood, in
which mothering is constructed as a matter of natural, unproblematic, instinctive
response to children’s needs for protection. Faced with the reality, women’s
reactions are considerably more complex—fortunately for those (mostly men
and boys) who sexually abuse children, and also for children who are abused
whose difficulties would certainly be compounded by the prosecution and
probable imprisonment of their mothers. The central aim of this book is to
demonstrate the complexity of mothers’ responses and the way they are
embedded in the social relations within which child sexual abuse occurs.
As recognition of child sexual abuse and professional experience have grown
during the last decade, so has awareness of the complex dilemmas it raises for
all those paid for their involvement in child protection work. Professional experts
have acquired greater humility in the face of their own failures and mistakes. In
the mainstream professional literature, such understanding has rarely been
extended to the women on whose unpaid care both workers and children rely
in the aftermath of abuse. The mother-blaming in much of this literature has
been identified by previous feminist work (Nelson, 1987; Hooper, 1987;
MacLeod and Saraga, 1988). The secondary aim of this book is to contribute
to more realistic expectations of and appropriate help for mothers, and hence
also for children who are sexually abused.
The book is based primarily on a study involving depth interviews with
fifteen women whose children had been sexually abused. It is a small sample
on which to base a book. However, the women’s accounts were complex and
detailed, and the aim of providing an initial exploration of a neglected area I
hope justifies the sample size. The study was informed by a feminist perspective,
by which I mean it aimed to make women’s experience visible and to ground
analysis in their own accounts. By and large, feminist theory on child sexual
abuse has taken the accounts of adult women survivors as its starting point.
viii Mothers surviving child sexual abuse
Extending this to include the experiences of mothers, while recognising both
the interconnectedness and the potential conflict between women and their
children, is a necessary complement.
The book also draws in parts on a small study of social work cases of child
sexual abuse, in which thirteen case records were analysed and the social
workers interviewed to explore ‘the other side’ of the mother-social worker
interaction. That study is written up elsewhere (Hooper, 1990), but I draw on
its analysis here to identify parallels between the responses of mothers and of
social workers, and in considering the implications of the main study for
social work practice. There is increasing recognition of the importance of
their mothers’ support for children who are sexually abused, so that working
with mothers to enable them to support their children has become a central
task for workers involved in child protection. Mothers and workers are not
clearly separate groups of course. During the time I was conducting the research
I met women social workers and child abuse researchers who had suspected
or discovered that their own children had been sexually abused, with similar
consequences for them to those described by the women I interviewed. This
overlap is often unrecognised in the professional construction of clients as an
other, and by implication problem, group.
The book’s title is intended to represent the sense women expressed of their
active struggles in response to the threats they had experienced (from the abuse
itself, and from the reactions of others). In work on violence against women
and children, feminists have recently replaced the term ‘victim’ with ‘survivor’,
to overcome the association of the former with passivity and with the study of
victimology. Neither is particularly satisfactory, if they are taken to imply whole
identities. Victimisation is a process, as is survival, and they may (or may not)
coexist. The agent of the first is the perpetrator of violence, the agent of the
second the woman or child victimised. There is a danger in this shift of labels
of losing sight of the reality of violence. Not all women do survive it. This is no
less true of sexual abuse than of other forms of violence, although the risk of
death lies more in suicide than in murder. There is also a danger of flattening
out all responses to the same level—survival should, after all, be a minimal aim.
Nevertheless, women whose children have been sexually abused have claimed
the label of survivors for themselves in recognition of both their suffering and
their strength (Baghramian and Kershaw, 1989).
It is common in the mainstream literature to refer to women in this position
only as ‘mothers’ (and sometimes to reduce them further to ‘maternal responses’)
and to men who abuse as ‘perpetrators’. I have tried where possible to avoid
this, to recognise in language that all those involved, women, children and men
who abuse have whole lives, identities and biographies. Sexual abuse is only
one part of these, however important a one, and its meaning for each individual
is constructed partly by this broader context of ongoing life histories.
1 Child sexual abuse and mothers
The issues
The sexual abuse of children has been a consistently high-profile public
issue throughout the late 1980s, and continues to be one. It is not a new
problem, nor is this the first period of its recognition. That it was adult
survivors speaking out in the 1970s about their childhood experiences which
initiated the current period of concern demonstrates that the problem itself
is a long-standing one, and this is confirmed—at least for the USA— by
research which has addressed the question of historical trends in incidence.
In the UK, the public silence which preceded the current anxiety was itself
preceded by a period of roughly sixty years, from the 1870s to the 1930s,
of social anxiety and campaigns for more effective action to prevent the
sexual abuse of children.1
Through this history of fluctuating visibility, the problem has been
defined in various ways, reflecting the relative power of the different interest
groups and social movements involved in promoting the issue. Children
and women have relatively little power over such definitions, and they
have often been blamed for the abuse perpetrated by men. Both the
responses of voluntary and statutory agencies and the theories of academics
and clinicians demonstrate this. In the responses of agencies, the
surveillance of girls and their mothers has played a more prominent part
than the control of men who abuse. The main focus has shifted from the
surveillance of sexually abused girls in the early part of this century towards
the surveillance of the mothers of sexually abused children in the later
part. Theoretical explanations followed a similar trend. In the 1930s, the
dominant explanation of incest, influenced by psychoanalytic ideas, focused
on girls seducing their fathers (cf. Bender and Blau, 1937; Sloane and
Karpinski, 1942). During the 1950s and 1960s this was gradually replaced
by the dysfunctional or pathological family analysis which accorded
mothers the central ‘role’ in father-daughter incest (cf. Kaufman et al.,
1954; Lustig et al., 1966).
Feminists, who have played an important part in achieving public