A sight many of us see and often enjoy is the sound of children’s laughter while playing in the park. It’s a scene of innocence and joy. Except when you remember that at least 10% of those children have been sexually abused. Yes. That many!

I’m currently researching for my next project, and I stumbled across an alarming study via Google completed by Human Rights and UNSW

(https://www.humanrights.unsw.edu.au/news/worlds-largest-child-sexual-abuse-perpetration-prevalence-study-recommends-significant-investment-early-intervention-measures Identifying and understanding child sexual offending behaviours and attitudes among Australian men UNSW 11/2023).

This study found 10% of their 1500 male participants committed child sexual abuse (yes, they are paedophiles) and 30% imagined having sex with a child. Further, they had to imagine before committing. I say this percentage is even higher.

Recently I was at a dinner party where at one point four generations of women were in the kitchen. Somehow discussion turned to sex and each one of those women admitted to being sexually abused as children—four generations, every one of them abused!!

What does this mean for our society? When you are abused at such a young age, your ‘self’ is taken. ‘Self’ can be interchanged with soul, spirit, energy body, but it is essential in having agency and living a rewarding life and being a supportive member of a community.

We are facing a holocaust of issues, none more important than climate, but we as a society are incapable of shouting loud enough to stop it.

Rather, we meekly accept what our leaders and oligarchs feed us, to keep the peace. Does this sound familiar? Is this imitating Family Domestic Violence? Yes. We are being ghosted and gaslit. After all, we enjoy the comforts of this technological society. But I would go so far as to say, we have so many damaged individuals in our communities, they feel helpless and hopeless to initiate change in their own lives, let alone on a bigger scale.

I have experienced this. I was helpless and hopeless. I was going through the motions of life and it wasn’t until another trauma unlocked the buried memories. The first abuse I remembered was at the age of four. My mother was single. She had no family nor did she have the support of government pensions. She worked full time. She witnessed me being raped. Rather than bring the perpetrator to justice, she blamed me. Then she cut my hair and told me I was a boy! Yep!

I have been writing about this topic for over a decade. None of the works relating to this topic have ever been published, apart from on my blog. I’ve had feedback it’s too triggering and one organisation commended my writing but asked for a different subject. Why is this? Well, the study completed by HW and UNSW found of the 1500 participants, those who will commit child sexual assault are middle-class men. Men of means. And my ‘Piagetian’ study proves this.

I have heard recounts from women who have been abused at the dentists, the doctors, the psychologists.

Others had family friends commit the act, and parents have accused them of lying, while others were abused at places of worship. We’re not talking the fringe population, we’re talking mainstream. Well, let’s not say talking—because no one talks about it. It’s too disturbing. Too triggering. But, if you’re triggered, I would recommend speaking to a health professional. You may discover you were abused, but your subconscious has buried it. The reason we don’t want to address this horrific topic is, in the wise words of Dr Judith Herman;

‘It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.’

Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery

Thank you #metoo and Gisèle Pelicot for opening the discussion on violence and rape against women. Bringing it into the mainstream to the point media cannot ignore. Now please, can we give the victim/survivors of child sexual abuse the same right. Or are we going to continue this silence, allowing the likes of the 1970s BBC to cover up and deny?