Sexual Abuse of Young Children: Evaluation and Treatment

A manual for professionals and advocates working with molested children. Be prepared for medical jargon as well as colloquial description of body parts. The authors describe how an evaluation of a child takes place when sexual abuse is suspected. They describe the interview process which will be tailored to the developmental stage of the child. They look at the legal and social ramifications to members of the child's family when a perpetrator is exposed. Finally, they provide guidelines for individual treatment of the abused child as well as concurrent group treatment of children and their mothers. Anyone working with such children will most likely employ some variant of play therapy with anatomically correct dolls. "Show me what happened" is more likely to be successful with children who have been told not to tell anyone what happens at home. It will be important for therapists to be able to play with kids and to be patient in a process that cannot be hurried or directed. There will be instruction in "good touch/bad touch" as well as teaching refusal skills. Because parents of abused children have often been abused themselves, teaching both parent and child about refusal skills is an integral part of therapy. Mothers have to be helped not to punish a new assertiveness on the part of children who were successful in therapy. The authors conclude that the decade of the 1980s saw an end to "More than 80 years of denial and suppression of the existence of child sexual abuse by the Freudian establishment." What they give a cursory nod to, as well, is how innocent persons can be swept into an investigation in an age of heightened awareness.