It’s hard to forget the newly separated mother of a preschooler who came into my child psychology clinic 20-odd years ago, her face dark with fury. Earlier that week, her daughter had calmly reported to a daycare worker that “daddy tried to put froggies up my bum.” Convinced this was sexual abuse, the mother wanted me to evaluate the child and be prepared to testify in court to bar the father – in her mind, a criminal and a pervert – from ever visiting his child alone again.
Though I took the claim seriously, I admit I was reticent about the plan. This was the mid-1980s, the peak divorce years in Canada. The school of hard, if not vicious, knocks had taught me that divorcing parents will say anything, and I mean anything, to punish the other parent. And when I evaluated the girl, I discovered that she was doing just fine. She seemed placid, was eating, sleeping and playing well, and her developing skills were on target. Without prompting, she also told me, in her matter-of-fact croaky voice, that daddy had tried to put froggies “down there.” But I wondered, if that were true, why did she look and act so, well … normal? If she had been fondled, or if God forbid something worse had happened, wouldn’t she seem more traumatized?
The Trauma Myth: The Truth About the Sexual Abuse of Children ? and Its Aftermath, by Susan A. Clancy, Basic Books, 236 pages, $31.95
Like most clinicians, I believed the orthodoxy of the era, one that has persisted to this day: Child sexual abuse was like rape but even more traumatic. It was the ultimate violation, an act of force so violent and foreign that there would be no way a child could remain impassive.
Susan Clancy, a Harvard-trained psychologist and researcher, has discovered that the matter is much more complex, and courageously takes on the accepted wisdom in her trenchant new book, The Trauma Myth. This short, punchy work tells two connected stories. The first is Clancy’s well-written empirical account of how child sexual abuse really happens, why victims often stay silent and the real reasons for the oft-delayed, damaging aftermath of abuse. The second story is about how we crucify scientists whose findings don’t match our preconceptions. On hot-button issues they can be hounded out of their labs and research institutions if their data jeopardize long-accepted political scripts.
[The] co-opting of a child’s loyalty and 'participation' is what prompts great distress in victims later
The book’s narrative begins in the mid-1990s, when Clancy, then a graduate student, became interested in studying trauma and memory. She placed an ad for research subjects in The Boston Globe: “Were you sexually abused as a child? Please call Susan for more information regarding a research study in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.”
Urgent messages of adult respondents soon clogged her office voice mail. Clancy wasn’t surprised. She already knew that “childhood sexual abuse is exceedingly common. Approximately one in five children …” is how she tried to reassure Frank, her first volunteer, who felt compelled to exit the subway to call her as soon as he read the ad on his evening commute. Unlike the stereotype (think Precious or Lolita), Frank could have been a 42-year-old Cleaver from Leave It to Beaver, a middle-class married man with three kids and a steady job in the financial industry. Yet what Frank told her shocked Clancy.
