This is a slightly edited extract from Chapter 2 of It Takes A Village To Teach Your Children About Consent. You can buy the book from any online bookstore but if you buy it direct from the author all the profits go to her and none of your money goes to billionaires.
When I was writing this book I did many interviews with kids, parents and teachers. We covered a lot of very difficult topics but this was the one that everyone struggled with the most – what to do when children and teens sexually abuse other children. It was painful, frightening and so deeply confusing for everyone. Almost everyone I spoke to talked about a deep sense of wrongness, that made it almost impossible to understand what was happening. Children shouldn’t be – can’t be – abusers, and yet, they are committing acts that would unequivocally be sexual abuse if it was done by an adult. This extract explains some of the factors behind the disturbing increase in children and teens committing these acts and provides parents and families with a simple overview of what to tell your kids about potential harm from other children as well as from adults.
When children and teens commit abuse
Like most people, I have a few friends I know well enough to text but not well enough to call without prearrangement. When I get a call from one of those friends without warning, it’s usually because they, or someone they know, needs help dealing with a violent man. I carry all the services around in my head and I know why they want to get a recommendation from a person not a screen, so I’m happy to be the first voice on a phone telling someone that what happened was not their fault and help is available. I just need to be sure I’m not the only person who tells them that.
One of my Text Friends called me a few years back with disturbing variation in this pattern. I knew her through other friends, and I’d met her clever, quiet husband and their six-year-old son a few times. Their little boy was a lot of fun. Full of smartarsery and mischief, never stuck for a comeback, even if he was too often graphically scatological. Charm was often the only thing that kept him on the right side of the line between resilient and obnoxious.
Text Friend told me that a friend of hers had accused Charming Boy of sexually abusing her six-year-old daughter and reported him to the police. She wanted me to come with her to the interview because her husband wanted to stay home with their son. She said Charming Boy didn’t know about the police interview but when I went to pick her up, he was there, watching us with a pale, pinched look.
The detective turned out to be a lovely man who only wanted to see Text Friend because he was worried about her son. ‘Six year olds are not criminals,’ he told us. ‘I just want to make sure he’s not a victim of someone who is a criminal.’
The detective came to talk to my friend’s son and, in the gentlest, kindest way, managed to get to the truth of what happened. A kid at school had been showing the other kids a picture of adults having oral sex. My friend’s son didn’t understand why a woman would want to put a penis in her mouth and slid straight around the parental blocks on the home wi-fi to find more images of oral sex. They confirmed for him that fellatio is a real thing but didn’t explain it, so he had tried to understand it by recreating it with the six-year-old girl. He told the detective that the kids at school said they would get in trouble if adults found out about the image and he knew he might get in trouble for what he did with the little girl, but he didn’t understand that what he’d asked her to do could hurt her because ‘the lady in the video liked it a lot’.
Everyone involved spent at least a year in therapy afterwards. All the children (and parents) needed help to understand what happened and make sure it didn’t turn into the kind of secret trauma that can ruin lives. They were all very lucky that they had the means to find that support and stay with it for as long as they did.
No one involved faced any criminal charges, because, as the detective said, no one had committed a crime. But something went very wrong for all the children in this story. None of them were to blame but who was responsible for protecting all of them from the expanding ricochets of one confusing image in a playground?
There are no grey areas, no complexities involved when a mature adult involves a child in sexual activity. Adults have far too much power over children for there to be any ambiguity – adults who sexually abuse children are entirely responsible for the abuse. Children cannot consent, cannot defend themselves from adult manipulation and abuses of power. It’s a very clear distinction.
When the abuser is also a child that distinction is not nearly so clear. ‘Perpetrator’ is the wrong word to use about children who sexually abuse other children. The official term is ‘children who exhibit problematic and harmful sexual behaviour’ but parents and families of a child who’s been sexually abused by an older child or teen are rarely concerned about appropriate language.
In their 2021 survey of over 8500 people, the Australian Child Maltreatment Study found that when they were children, 12 per cent of people born between 1997 and 2005 were sexually abused by adults and 18 per cent were sexually abused by adolescents. But for people born before 1976, these figures were reversed, with 21 per cent reporting adult perpetrators and 12 per cent reporting adolescent perpetrators. In other words, 40 years ago, adults used to be people most likely to sexually abuse children. Now, it’s other children and teens.
We know enough to know that it is happening but not enough about why it’s happening. However, the increase in children and teens perpetrating sexual abuse over the last twenty years tracks smoothly alongside the increase in free online porn and it seems impossible to believe there is no connection. Graphic, often violent, sexual images are free and easily accessible online, and we know children, like my friend’s son and all his classmates, are seeing them.
We don’t have the smoking gun that proves a direct link between children and teens seeing porn and sexually abusing each other. But we do have common sense, which tells us that graphic sexual images could easily confuse and upset young children. We have sound evidence that children will try to process problems and confusion in their play with other children. We have good reason to believe there is a risk of serious harm when children are exposed to graphic or violent pornography, and we have the skills and knowledge to reduce that risk.
What might have kept my Text Friend’s son and all those other children safe? Ideally, no six-year-old would ever see graphic images of oral sex. If there was a way to guarantee that could never happen, then slam that bolt home and let’s move on to solving the next problem. Sadly, that’s not possible (more on this in Chapter 10), so the only thing we can do is prepare children, even very little children, for the content they might see online and make sure all the adults around them know how to have conversations that will help kids bring their questions and fears and curiosity to safe adults instead of the unregulated, profit-driven online world – or each other.
There are simple lessons children can learn that can help them to know how and when to tell adults what is happening before everything escalates to the point that children are being so terribly wounded. The pointers below are taken from the Victorian Department of Education’s curriculum materials for Foundation to Level Two.
It’s important to remember that while your child should be learning these lessons at school, the curriculum is very crowded, and some teachers find these topics difficult to teach (more on this in Chapter 1). Even when teachers are doing their best and covering these topics in detail, kids might be home sick during those lessons. Or they’re just not paying attention that day. They might even be there and have great fun in the class, but don’t retain the details because they didn’t seem relevant or important at the time. If parents and families reinforce these ideas at home, routinely and casually, in the same way you remind them about manners, clean socks and looking both ways when they cross a road, your children are much more likely to remember what they’ve been taught and be able to act on it in emotionally charged moments.
What do your kids need to know?
- Genitals are private parts, which means we keep them covered in public places and people don’t touch them unless they are helping us stay clean or managing our health. Even then, if we feel yuky or scared, we tell an adult about it.
- We use the proper words for our private parts – penis, scrotum, testicles, vulva, vagina and anus. If we have cute little euphemism for our genitals, doctors or teachers might not understand us when we say that something hurts or feels weird.
- There isn’t anything embarrassing or shameful about our genitals so it’s OK to talk about them and it’s always OK to ask questions about them. But they are private, so we don’t need to tell the lady we met at the shops about our genitals.
- Sometimes adults take pictures of their private parts and put them online. This is something for grown-ups and it is not meant for children.
- If you see those pictures by accident or because someone shows them to you, you have not done anything wrong and you will not get in trouble. But you should tell an adult that it happened so they can make sure you’re OK.
- If the person who showed you is another child they will not get in trouble either. But someone needs to help them understand what the picture means and make sure they are OK, so we need to tell a teacher or their parents what happened.
- If it was an adult who showed you the picture, the adult (not the child) did the wrong thing, and they need to know they shouldn’t show those pictures to children. So we have to tell someone who can make sure they understand and don’t do it again.
- Sometimes those pictures can be confusing and upsetting for kids, so we don’t show them to each other, we tell a grown-up about it.
- If we see pictures online that don’t make sense, it’s OK to have questions about them. Even if you think it might be rude or private, you are never doing the wrong thing when you ask a safe adult a question about things you don’t understand.
- It’s never OK to touch someone else’s private parts, especially someone who is smaller or younger than you. It might hurt them or scare them, but they might not be able to tell you that they’re hurt or scared.
- If you do touch another child, or if someone touches your private parts, or if someone shows you a picture or video that makes you feel uncomfortable, you never have to keep that secret.
- It’s great that you tell your dog or your big sister about the things that upset you, but an adult is someone who has finished growing and could take you to a doctor if needed. Who are the adults you would go to if you had a question that was a bit rude or embarrassing or scary?
Children also need to know that it is never their fault if someone older, bigger or more powerful did something to hurt or frighten them. It’s also not their fault if another child was hurt or frightened. Even if they were naughty or rude or had bad thoughts about someone, nothing they did or could ever do would make it their fault or mean they deserved to be hurt. No child ever deserves to be hurt.
You and your child need to have a clear understanding of the safe adults in their life. Sometimes it will be you but if they’re lucky, they will have other adults in their life as well. It’s very difficult for one person to be in charge of consequences (‘you were sending rude messages to a kid at school, so you have to put your phone in a drawer when you get home each day’) and confidences (‘it’s OK to tell me if you’ve done something you regret’). We need the village.
All state and national curriculum include lessons on help-seeking, which usually starts with asking kids to think about the safe adults in their life as well as the more official resources such as police and helplines. It’s still important for you to have that conversation with your kids because if they choose a family member or friend as one of their safe adults, you’ll need to talk to that person too. The rest of this chapter is about the knowledge and tools all safe adults need to have, such as some of the main warning signs to watch out for, how to respond to disclosures and where to find help for children who are not safe.
This is a slightly edited extract from Chapter 2 of It Takes A Village To Teach Your Children About Consent. You can buy the book from any online bookstore but if you buy it direct from the author all the profits go to her and none of your money goes to billionaires.
Finding help
Parents and families who want to get help for kids who have done something to another child are often afraid that asking for help could trigger mandatory reporting requirements that sends their child into the criminal system rather than getting them the help and support they need. This might be the case with teens but it’s unlikely with children under 10 years of age. Regardless of the child’s age, they and you do not need to deal with this alone. There are services available for both of you.
Almost all the services are state based and they move around as new programs get funded (or defunded). Rather than trying to keep a list of every service around the country, I’ve linked to the most stable sites that keep up to date with each states territory and the services on offer.
StopItNow (ph: 1800 01 1800) is an Australian helpline for anyone worried about their own or someone else’s sexual thoughts or behaviours – including children and teens. They offer confidential support and you can be anonymous if you choose.
You could also try Parentline, which has dedicated phone and online counselling available for parents and family members in each state and territory.
Depending on where you live, specialist sexual assault services in your state might also be a good option. They usually take calls from people who have been sexually abused or sexually assaulted, but they are also likely to understand the complications of this issue and hopefully have some idea of services in your state.
The National Office for Child Safety also lists many services available to anyone who needs help with child safety.
