Talking about Child Sexual Abuse Can Help End Child Sexual Abuse

Joan Tabachnick ’86 has worked in the field of child sexual abuse prevention for more than 30 years and developed widely used educational tools and programs. She serves on the advisory council of Stop It Now, and recently retired as the executive director of MASOC—the Massachusetts Society for a World Free of Sexual Harm by Youth.

Q: What do people need to understand about child sexual abuse?

For many years, we ignored child sexual abuse. When I started working in this field, more than 30 years ago, there weren’t stories in the newspaper. There was nothing on television news. There wasn’t even Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

If it hadn’t been for survivors speaking out, I don’t think we ever would’ve broken the silence. Their determination and courage to keep speaking until they were listened to was phenomenal. That changed everything.

We’ve broken the silence, but we haven’t really learned to talk about sexual abuse yet. That’s the next step for this work.

Q: What do you mean?

If we collectively were willing to talk about this very difficult subject and see clearly both the scope of child sexual abuse and the impact it has, we would have large-scale investment in care for survivors and in prevention so there wouldn’t be more victims.

Many people assume child sexual abuse is inevitable. I firmly believe it is preventable. However, prevention means being real about the problem as it is and being willing to develop a range of solutions that aren’t going to be simple, neat fixes.

Most of us know someone who has been harmed by sexual violence, whether we realize it or not. As survivors speak out, more and more of us become aware of that truth. Yet, we aren’t willing to talk about the fact that if you know someone who has been abused, you likely know someone who has committed sexual abuse, since child sexual abuse usually occurs within families.

The examples that come to mind when people think about child sexual abusers are our worst fears—people like Larry Nassar, who sexually abused hundreds of girls as the team doctor for U.S. national women’s gymnastics. It’s important to acknowledge that people like that exist. They need to be arrested and removed from society to stop them from causing further harm. However, when we fixate on the most extreme instances, it keeps us from seeing the majority of the abuse that is happening. Recent research found that 70% of children who have been sexually abused were abused by another, often older, child. And it’s estimated that the majority of youth who perpetrate abuse were traumatized themselves.

A child who has been abused and acts out that abuse on another child is different from someone who has carried out predatory behavior for decades. If you grew up in a household without boundaries, it’s hard to know what is and isn’t acceptable behavior. We can’t just arrest our way out of this, especially when we are talking about children and teens. We need different tools for responding to those very different situations.

Q: Does treatment work?

Only in recent decades have we begun looking at preventing problematic sexual behaviors in children and youth. This opportunity for prevention was largely ignored until quite recently. And there is hope, the research shows that most children or teens will not reoffend sexually—the recidivism rate for children and youth is lower than 5%.

That’s for when the abuse has been reported and it was possible to intervene early in the young person’s development. There’s a lot more we need to understand and more research is needed because we know children will always be making mistakes and sometimes the mistakes can cause tremendous harm to someone else; we need to be able to support both the child that has been harmed and the child that has caused the harm.

Q: Is treatment accountability?

There are a number of ways to consider accountability. First, it’s estimated that 90% of abuse is not reported. There’s no accountability there.

Second, there needs to be less onus on survivors to be the only ones speaking up. We all need to be responsible. We can recognize that when a child has been sexually abused, everyone surrounding that child is also harmed. It’s not the same as what happens to the child, but there is harm to the families, friends, and communities around the child and the adult, teen, or child who harmed them. All of us are affected. So we all need to take more responsibility.

Early on in doing this work, I interviewed convicted sex offenders in prison. This is something I learned at Yale SOM. If I wanted to understand all possible audiences for abuse prevention messages, I needed to talk with them to learn what they would want to know, who they would listen to, and so much more. It was a radical idea at the time but grounded in basic marketing.

I remember going to a maximum-security prison in New York, sitting at a metal table in a room with a small, barred window and prison green walls. The man sitting across from me was warm and affable. He said that, to him, it was obvious that he was sexually abusing young boys but nobody in his family, nobody in his circle of friends, and nobody at work ever asked him about it. He said, “I felt it was tacit permission.”

We need to make clear there is no tacit permission. The men I spoke with said they chose children who were unlikely to disclose what was happening to them. Rather than blaming children for not reporting, we can help them by looking more closely at what’s happening around us. I’m not saying being vigilant at every moment, but if there’s something that you are concerned about, ask a question, step in to set a boundary. That’s a path to accountability.

Another model for both treatment and accountability was developed by Hollow Water, a First Nation program in Canada. A member of the First Nation who has sexually abused someone in the community is given a choice of either going through the criminal justice system or a restorative justice program in their tribal community. The program includes a victim’s circle where the harm doer listens to the impact of what they did on the adult, adolescent, or child as well as the impact on every member of the community. Some people choose prison over that difficult work. But Hollow Water was developed because this community believed that offenders returned from jail without having learned anything and too often offended again.

Restorative justice asks three questions: who has been harmed, what was the harm, and what can be done to repair that harm. Hollow Water seeks to provide healing to the person harmed. It seeks to have offenders take responsibility for what they’ve done and the harm they’ve caused. And it seeks to maintain ongoing accountability in the person who harmed through being held within the community—accepting them but not their harmful behaviors.

Having alternatives to our criminal justice system makes so much sense when we’re talking about families. But that requires a real shift in how we think about accountability.

Q: What do we know about the impact of child sexual abuse on survivors?

Research shows that sexual abuse impacts people differently. It is trauma. It is devastating. But people can heal. It’s really important to never tell a child or their family that they will be damaged forever. If you or your child has been sexually abused, your life may be forever changed, but it doesn’t mean that you are always living in that harm.

A lot depends on what other supports a child has. Protective factors like love and support mitigate some of the impact of the abuse.

We know that if we do address abuse, there’s reason for hope for both the people who have been harmed and the people who have done the harm. I think that’s a really important piece that we’ve learned over these last 30 years.

Q: What else would you point to as things we’ve learned?

Again, we’ve gotten better at recognizing that sexual abuse is an issue. We have a long way to go, but we’ve gotten better supporting survivors. And in the last ten years, it has become clear that perpetration prevention is a critical piece of this puzzle that has been missing. It’s what I care most about. I’m proud that over my career, I’ve been able to shift the dial a little bit to where prevention, particularly preventing the perpetration of child sexual abuse, is now part of the conversation.

While we need to work on prevention that targets everyone, where I find the most promise is how we prevent the development of these behaviors in children and youth. With changing social norms and devices allowing kids access to pornography, we need to talk with children about boundaries at a very early age.

That means not only teaching a child that no one has the right to touch you, but also that you don’t have the right to touch someone else. It means talking about healthy relationships and eventually about the importance of consent. Teaching about healthy relationships, boundaries, and consent are all concepts key to perpetration prevention.

In public health, we talk about green-, yellow-, and red-light behaviors. Green-light behaviors are appropriate and healthy. Yellow-light behaviors are a concern—not abuse, not reportable, but they need to be addressed. It’s important to talk about what’s concerning. Kids are going to make mistakes. We need to be able to have a non-shame-based response, so yellow-light behaviors are recognized as something that isn’t OK and needs to be corrected, apologized for, and not repeated. And having green- and yellow-light conversations can make it easier to know, “That was a red light. We need to report it.”

Q: When people are concerned or are trying to have conversations that they aren’t quite sure how to approach, what can they do?

There are resources people can find online. One I know well, because I helped to start the organization, is Stop It Now. If someone’s breaking boundaries or sees that someone is crossing the line for them or their child, Stop It Now has a helpline where anyone can call to learn how to have a “I’m concerned about how you’re acting around my child” conversation.

People talk about it being hard to speak truth to power. I believe speaking truth to someone you love is even harder. Shifting the way we set boundaries can be invaluable. For example, if Uncle Henry is tickling your child and they say stop, rather than saying, “Oh, Uncle Henry doesn’t mean anything by that,” it can be an opportunity to step in and say, “Uncle Henry, clearly my child has just said, ‘Stop’ three times. We are teaching our child it’s OK to say no. Can you please respect boundaries?” It’s modeling it for your child. And you’re also telling Uncle Henry, here’s a clear boundary around the family.

Q: What if that conversation doesn’t go well or concerns aren’t alleviated?

I remember one woman who called the helpline to say, “This is what I’m seeing.” She called back again and again as she was learning more and more. Eventually she knew enough to make a report, which is a very hard thing to do.

When people are sure sexual abuse is happening, most will say something. But child sexual abuse is something that’s done behind closed doors. And so you’re probably not 100% sure what’s happening. What if you are wrong and by acting you lose the person who creates income for your family, and your whole family is shamed and vilified?

If your only option is to call in the police and child protective services, and if you are certain that will destroy your family, weighing that against not being sure what’s going on—it’s a huge barrier. I have a lot of compassion for how scary that can be. That’s why being able to ask questions, get support and education, is valuable.

Q: Stop It Now also fields calls from people who are abusers or are worried about their thoughts and feelings towards children.

Fran Henry founded Stop It Now. She is a survivor of child sexual abuse. She has discussed publicly that she was abused by her father. That let her understand that it’s putting too much on a child to ask them to report their own family member. It would have helped her if her father would have taken responsibility.

We can’t depend on abusers reporting themselves, but the first person to call the helpline said, “I’m a sex offender. I need help.” There are people out there who know what they’re doing is wrong, but don’t know where to turn. If we want to stop child sexual abuse, why wouldn’t we make it possible for abusers to get support? Why wouldn’t we help keep potential abusers from starting?

We need to have both accountability and compassion. You can’t expect someone to take responsibility if you don’t have compassion. But compassion without accountability doesn’t help end sexual abuse. It doesn’t create safety, doesn’t allow the survivor the opportunity to heal. Still, it’s very hard for us to think about compassion and accountability together. It’s antithetical to how we typically think about addressing sexual abuse.

Q: It’s hard to hear that we should have compassion for someone who has done something horrible. It’s hard to hear that a solution is going to be uncomfortable and ongoing in the sense that it might be more effective for an offender to be held in the community rather than shunned.

Some of my best advocacy work has come from the intensity of feeling self-righteous. But I’ve come to believe that as soon as I’m feeling self-righteous, I’m not on the right pathway to fully addressing the problem.

One of the more powerful things that I’ve done in my career was something called the Dialogue Project. We asked survivors of child sexual abuse to talk together with people who have caused harm about the need for prevention.

In preparing for these public events, a lot of people would say, “How can you have a survivor and offender sitting right next to each other?” The sarcastic part of me would think, “For many families, that happens every day at breakfast. The difference is we’re talking about it.” But usually what I would say—which was equally true—was, “I think it’s really important to listen to each of these voices, listen to what we can learn, especially when we can hear them together.”

In many cases, what the dialogues did was help the audience work through their resistance around talking about child sexual abuse.

One of the men in the Dialogue Project had sexually abused young boys. He was asked if he would say, “I will never sexually abuse a child again.” He answered, “I don’t want to do it again. I don’t want to harm anybody. I don’t want to go back to prison. But I count on my friends and family to make sure I am following my safety plan and to confront me if I veer away from that. So, I won’t promise that I will never do this again because that lets everyone off the hook.”

It gave me chills. It really would’ve been a nice, easy answer to say, “I’ve learned my lesson. I will never do this again.” I wanted him to say it. And the audience very clearly wanted him to say it. But his answer challenges us all to stay engaged.

There are so many ways where changing the way we think and talk about the problem could open up new possibilities. When I started this work, people who worked with victims and people who worked with offenders were in completely different silos. Even today, I know of only two organizations in the country that work with both survivors and offenders in the same organization. There are absolutely circumstances where working with each group separately may be the most beneficial approach, but too often I think it’s for our professional comfort because clearly there are circumstances, especially within families, where breaking down the silos is crucial for moving forward.

Families don’t experience this in separate silos. Think about what it means for the parent who is shuttling one child who has been abused over here and another child who committed the abuse over there. In terms of the help and support they need, they deserve professionals who have experience working with the whole family dynamic.

Q: How did you come to do this work?

After college, I worked on environmental issues. I quickly realized environmental policy isn’t decided on the latest scientific research; it’s based on whether or not a policy is economically feasible. I didn’t understand economics, so I decided to get an MBA. I wanted a program that would address the human aspect of the issues facing society. Yale SOM was the perfect blend of business and society.

After graduating, I returned to doing environmental work. When a project I was working on lost funding, I sought out Fran because the work she was doing in nonprofit consulting sounded interesting. She told me about consulting. But she also told me about her effort to launch Stop It Now. It was so clear that what she was trying to do could make a difference that I started volunteering. When we raised enough money, I became the second employee.

Q: Has your experience at Yale SOM shaped how you do the work?

I’ve run across very few people who have MBAs doing sexual violence work, but it has been an invaluable foundation. Budgets don’t scare me, but more importantly, I’m always thinking both strategically and tactically. We agree on the goal of ending child sexual abuse. How do we get there? What works? What do we need to have in place to make that happen? What audiences do we need to reach? The approach of thinking strategically and tactically got drilled into me at Yale SOM.

Additionally, because of the networks I had from Yale SOM, people have shared expertise and donated their time and skills. That has been a huge piece of completing numerous projects and was particularly important because sexual abuse prevention is not an area which is well-funded. It’s very hard to get people to donate to this kind of work. A $10,000 grant made a huge difference for Stop It Now and allowed us to start the first helpline for people at risk to sexually abuse and their friends and families. Another organization where I was the executive director, MASOC, the Massachusetts Society for a World Free of Sexual Harm by Youth, ran on $25,000 a year for over 15 years before state grants gave us a little more leeway. Because all of these organizations are so lean, even the smallest donation can have a huge impact.

Q: How do you keep doing such challenging work without burning out?

You have to have a sense of hope, and I do. I am inspired by the resilience of people. I see the progress we have made. People are starting to understand that child sexual abuse can be prevented. The research shows that prevention is a smart investment. Now we just have to galvanize public opinion.