Learning from Victim Survivors
Children have identified that their experience of talking to someone about sexual abuse was positive when they were believed; some action was taken to protect them and when emotional support was provided.
Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse
Before telling someone you want to lock your mouth up…you feel like you have a dead end, you’ve hit a dead end and you don’t know what to do and you’re trapped and your feelings are trapped inside you and you don’t know what to do…you’re worried and you’re scared…and you might feel angry, confused and also you might feel like you’ve locked yourself in like a prison that is keeping your worries from coming out.
Female, 8 years (Warrington et al., 2017, p.41)
Victims and survivors need to feel confident they will be believed, that their disclosures will be thoroughly investigated and that advice and support will be available as soon as a disclosure has been made.
NSCPCC – Would They Have Actually Believed Me? (Exton and Thandi, 2013)
The 2017 publication Making Noise (Warrington et al., 2017) aimed to improve understanding of children and young people’s experiences of Sexual Abuse in terms of disclosures, support, contact with services and the criminal justice system as well as many other aspects of their experiences and the full report can be found here. When the authors of the report considered children’s expectations that they would be believed and taken seriously if they disclosed abuse, they received the following statement from a 16 year old victim of abuse:
If they are a religious family – they’re less likely to believe [allegations of sexual abuse] – if it’s religious they think your family has a strong bond – and it’s quite hard to believe that a person who is strongly religious could do that. In my family we’re all quite religious. Cause like mine – my family – I’m a Muslim and – so people think Muslims don’t do things like that… They would be confused – it would really get them confused… Also say if it was a male – the male side of the family – for them it will be hard to believe it – they wouldn’t want to believe it – they would probably think she’s a little child she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.