Behavior changes provide indicators of child sex abuse

This is the fifth installment in an ongoing series about child sex abuse in Lincoln County.

By BOB HENLINE

The Western News

For a variety of reasons, including fear, shame, guilt and confusion, child victims of sexual abuse often don’t report their victimization to authority figures or law enforcement, but aware and educated adults can recognize the behavioral signs of abuse and step in to help child victims, according to national experts. Dana Toole, a licensed clinical social worker with the Montana Children’s Justice Bureau, said given those factors, it is important for adults to be aware of the warning signs of abuse in children.

The most important behavioral indicator of abuse, she said, is a dramatic change in a child’s behavior.

“What I tell parents and caregivers to look for in a child is a behavior change,” she said. “Some kids are naturally shy, so in those children look for more acting up and acting out. In more boisterous children, look for them turning inward and becoming withdrawn. Children that usually sleep well but suddenly develop trouble sleeping, or outgoing children all of a sudden pulling away from their friends, those are what we call ‘red flag’ behaviors.”

Toole said the red flags don’t necessarily indicate the occurrence of sexual abuse in a child, as children often exhibit similar behaviors in response to various stressers, but they do help indicate the presence of an issue in the child’s life. Those issues, she said, should provide parents, caregivers, educators and other adults in the child’s life with warning that something is amiss with the child. 

Behavioral warning signs can vary, depending upon the age and the typical behavior pattern of the child. One consistent sign, regardless of age and normal behavior, however, is age-inappropriate sexual knowledge and behavior. Children who have been subjected to sexual abuse tend to exhibit more knowledge of sexual activity and behave in more overtly sexual behavior than would typically be appropriate or typical for their age and maturity levels. Those signs have become more difficult to ascertain lately, Toole said, due to the relative ease of access to sexually explicit material.

“One of the challenges now, and I’ve seen this change even in the last five years, with all kids is that there is so much sexually explicit and inappropriate material available on television, computers or telephones,” she said. “The other thing we find is that adults aren’t as keyed in to how much sexually explicit material is readily available, so they need to be extremely vigilant about what their children are exposed to.”

In younger children, reversion to even younger behavior is often apparent. Children often times fall back into toddler-age behavior and have difficulty with bed-wetting or restroom accidents. A return to thumb-sucking and unexplained tantrums are also indicate a traumatic event in preschool-aged children.

Younger children, she said, don’t have the vocabulary or maturity to process and effectively communicate what has happened to them. What they know, however, are the attention-gaining behaviors of their earliest years. They use those behaviors to call for help.

“What happens, in preschool kids, those children don’t have the life experience or the vocabulary to understand or desribe what happened to them, so they regress,” she said. “They resort to behaviors that they know, and it makes sense, they’ve been told it’s OK, and they have no words to put to the experience so it comes out behaviorally. Because of that limited vocabulary they only use words that they know and often times those words don’t make sense so they are easy to discredit due to lack of understanding.”

In older children, experts encourage parents and caregivers be wary when a child shrinks away from or seems threatened by physical contact. Children who are abused often exhibit signs of fear, depression or post-traumatic stress. Such signs also include nightmares and the development of various phobias which were not present in the child prior to the onset of abuse.

As children reach adolescence, the signs are often more direct, but also more difficult to attribute to any specific cause. Older children often exhibit signicant changes in hygiene behavior, such as refusing to bathe or, conversely, excessive bathing and washing. Older children also often run away from home or school and school performance changes dramatically in terms of attendance, attitude and grades. Toole said the signs run the entire gamut of performance, as some child victims withdraw and perform poorly, while others decide they need to present as perfect children as a shielding mechanism to cover the shame of the abuse. These children strive for perfection and excel at everything, almost to a point of obsessive behavior.

Some of the more dramatic signs in children include self-harming behaviors such as cutting or other forms of self-abuse or mutilation. Adolescent children are also more apt to express suicidal thoughts or attempt suicide as a response to sexual abuse.

“Children have an amazing ability to compartmentalize the abuse,” Toole said. “They put it in a little box in their brain and learn to not think about it. They appear normal and non-traumatized when they’re not thinking about it, but it doesn’t stay there. As they reach puberty and their bodies start to change, it comes breaking out.”

That break-out behavior is one of the key components of adolescent-age reporting of sex crimes, she said. Adolescent children often develop a fear that their abuser is abusing other, younger children, possibly even a sibling. Adolescent children who have been the victims of sexual abuse often times assume a more adult role in the protection of younger children, especially siblings and close family members.

Toole said it is important to understand that the signs are indicators, not evidence of abuse. Because of the wide variety of child behaviors and the diverse experiences of children, pinning any specific behavior to an instance of sexual abuse is very difficult. The solution, she said, is to create an environment in which society engages in a discussion of abuse with an eye toward prevention.

“The variety of behaviors make it difficult to know for sure what has happened, which is why we need to be open about sex abuse and have this discussion,” she said. “We have to create a culture where it’s OK for kids to talk about abuse and report it to adults without fear or guilt.”