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[This is a long article from the BBC. Follow the link at the bottom to read the rest and see the video. Originally posted by Newshound at boychat.] Hidden problem of children sexually abusing children To find out your five-year-old son has been sexually abused is, of course, devastating. But how do you cope when you find out that his abuser is his seven-year-old sister? Claire's daughter Hannah was discovered abusing her brother, late last year. Both names have been changed to protect their identities. "That was probably the darkest week of my life without a doubt," explains Claire. "All the anger and the rage, the confusion, the revulsion. I couldn't look at her. I wanted to grab my son and run and never see her again. I was just terrified." But Claire had more to face when it quickly emerged that Hannah had also been sexually abusing several other children. Hannah is typical of one third of the children who display sexually harmful behaviour - to use the preferred clinical terminology - in that she has also been sexually abused herself. Learned behaviour Hannah was regularly sexually assaulted by a teenage boy for around two years. "She didn't understand at the beginning what she was doing was wrong. For her it was just learnt behaviour," explains Claire. "Her interaction with other people was all based on that because it went on for two years. So that can't be wiped away, we just have to steer her away in a different direction." [...] It is a startling fact that one-third of those who sexually abuse children are just children themselves; something which challenges our notions of childhood and understanding of what children are capable of. Claire says that her experience has made her realise just how taboo the subject is with people, most of whom prefer to think that what is actually sexually harmful behaviour is just normal childhood playing. Even professionals, she says, questioned whether she was misinterpreting what her daughter had been doing. "If I hadn't been thrust into it in such a horrible way, I wouldn't have wanted to believe it either," she says. "But this wasn't kiss chase. This wasn't something innocent... it was a sexual act. It wasn't role play in a childlike way. "It was something you might imagine seeing in a late-night porn show. [...] [Anonymization] [Anonymizer] [@nonymouse] [proxy.mxds.ch] |