One of the biggest fears among parents is of their children being subjected to sexual abuse. The worst part is the abuse might happen right under the nose of the parent, with devastating consequences on the child’s future.
A child can be violated by a family member, a relative, domestic worker, teacher or a neighbour, and the parents may never know about it. There’s worrying evidence that child sexual abuse could be prevalent, as persons entrusted with the child inflict lifelong trauma on the victim.
To add to the trauma, child victims fear exposing their abusers. Reasons range from ignorance and threats of physical harm to possible loss of financial assistance. Victims face shame and ridicule instead of getting support. In some cases, the victims are accused of making up stories to destroy the family reputation, especially if the abuser is a prominent person in society.
“My aunt, who’s a nurse, said I was paranoid and possessed with demons and needed prayers [because] her husband was a pastor,” says a woman who was raped by her aunt’s husband during her teenage years. “My aunt — my blood — defended her husband, saying he’s a man of God and that I was lying. She called me a schemer.”
Another woman was sexually abused by a relative at the age of six while visiting her father’s rural village. She was not with her parents during the visit. “When I told my parents, I was beaten and taken back to the city,” she recounts. Now an adult, the woman believes the experience destroyed her ability to enjoy intimate relations. “I never enjoy sex and can stay long periods without it,” she says.
Victims of child sexual abuse carry the scars all their lives but cannot talk about it because of guilt, shame and trauma. In 2019, Facebook page AmKenyan encouraged people to share their experiences of childhood sexual abuse. The page is run by local human rights campaigners. Many of the people who responded by sharing their stories said they had never told anybody about it in their lives. The survivor stories in this article were obtained from the page.
My aunt, who’s a nurse, said I was paranoid and possessed with demons and needed prayers [because] her husband was a pastor
PERVERTED RELATIVES
A criminology researcher has been looking at the stories published on AmKenyan and his findings are disturbing. “You may be living with someone who is abusing a child,” says Dennis Miano, a lecturer in criminology and forensic science at the Dedan Kimathi University. “Many attacks are done by relatives, including those taking care of orphans,” he says.
Out of 39 cases of child sex abuse reported on AmKenyan, 22 involved relatives. That’s more than half the number of cases. Other cases involved house helps, farmworkers, teachers and neighbours. Just three sexual attacks on children out of the 39 Miano has analysed were done by strangers. That means child sex abuse by strangers was just 7.7 per cent of the cases reported on AmKenyan.
Sex attackers were both male and female. One man talked of being sexually abused by female family members when he was a boy because they all slept in the same room. His abusers had plenty of time and opportunity to violate him. The early exposure to sex made him constantly crave for it. As an adult, he had multiple sex partners, which eventually got him infected with HIV. “We are labelled misfits … mwanaume malaya (male prostitute),” he wrote. “We never chose this life; it chose us or someone chose it for us when we were too young to protest and stand our ground.”
LIFELONG IMPACT
As the anonymous man explains, child sex abuse has a permanent impact on the victims. In analysing the cases, Miano finds that the victims reported suffering from low self-esteem, depression, thoughts of suicide and inability to connect with other people. Some victims became rebellious teenagers. Childhood trauma created sexual addiction in some victims but destroyed the desire for romance in others. One woman wrote that she vomits at the thought of intimacy.
“People who were sexually molested as children have a very rough view of the world from which they are unable to recover,” Miano explains. The attacks happened during the child’s formative years. According to the United Nations Children Fund (Unicef), the formative years are the period from birth up to eight years of age. Research shows that traumatic events in the formative years of life can produce violent behaviour in adulthood.
Sex offenders tend to be very close to the victim’s family, which is why they carry out the abuse for years without anybody else knowing. One victim writing in AmKenyan revealed that she was abused by her father’s brother, who took responsibility for her upbringing after her own father died.
The sexual abuse started when the girl moved into the abuser’s home. The man would violate the girl any time the rest of the family was out of the house. When schools were reopening, he would drive the girl to school as he continued violating her along the way, sometimes making stopovers at roadside hotels. She could not tell anybody about the ordeal because she was financially dependent on the abuser. “To parents out there, take care of your children. Rapists are always the closest and most decent people,” she wrote.
DETECTING ABUSE
The World Health Organisation describes several red flags of child sex abuse. Though injuries around the private parts are a telltale sign, WHO warns that a child victim may not have any physical marks. If the child is regularly diagnosed with urinary tract infections and sexually transmitted infections, that’s a warning sign. The child may complain of pain in or around their private areas. Children subjected to sexual assault may continue bed-wetting and soiling their clothes past the age they are expected to stop.
On non-physical signs, the child’s performance in school might drop, he or she might suffer low self-esteem, might develop eating disorders (eating too little or too much), may become clingy and irritable, and might also start having sleeping problems. The child may exhibit what the WHO describes as sexualised behaviour. The child might, for example, try to do with other children the actions inflicted by the abuser.
The child victim may start fearing or hating the abuser and not wanting to be anywhere with the person. One woman described stabbing a teacher with a pencil while in class because he was violating her. Another woman talked of being questioned by her family on why she hates her uncle, not even wanting to hear anything about him. The uncle sexually attacked her during her childhood.
“Parents should be alert to any changes in their children. They should not be too quick to send their children to live with relatives during school holidays,” criminology lecturer Miano advises. Whenever a child reports a sexual violation, parents should take the matter seriously. In too many cases, the parents either don’t believe the child or they dismiss the report. With no one coming to the rescue, the child keeps quiet and the abuse continues.
Miano is an advocate of sex education in schools but suggests it should go beyond merely describing the biological process of reproduction. “Sex education should help learners understand the psychosocial impacts of sexual activity,” he says.
