Listen to thisI was talking to some frontline workers recently about a young person in their care who had been horrifically sexually abused. They were having some difficulty understanding some of the behaviour the young person was displaying. They wanted me to help them understand what was going on with the young person.
I asked them a number of questions about the young man – you know, the standard kind of things you ask when you are trying to develop a picture in your mind of someone you have never met. The staff members were able to provide lots of stories about the sexual abuse. They were able to provide a great deal of detail. However, when I started to ask questions about whether the young man had been abused in any other way they had little or no information about what he had experienced outside of or in conjunction with the sexual abuse. I suggested to them that if they really wanted to understand what he was doing they had to find out a lot more about what has had happened to him in his life. We ended the conversation with me providing them with a number of questions that I thought they needed to have answered before they could put together an effective plan of action.
As I was going home I found myself getting upset with the workers. Not angry but upset. I knew most of them and they are good Child and Youth Care workers. They know the importance of developing a full picture of the young people in their care. I have seen them put together lots of good intervention plans. They had shown the skill time and time again. Yet in this situation they had only gone after part of the picture. It didn’t make any sense to me. Why had they stopped at the sexual abuse in trying to gather information about this young person?
A few days later I was talking to one of the staff and raised my concern with him. After some discussion it struck me that they had stopped because they thought they had all the information they needed. When I asked him if it would be important to know if the boy had been physically abused he said yes but not as important as knowing that he had been sexually abused. It was as if this staff member thought that there was some kind of hierarchy of abuse in which physical abuse was somehow less hurtful than sexual abuse. My guess is that his colleagues thought the same way. I’m not sure the reason why people would need to think this way but I am sure that it is disrespectful to the victims of abuse for us to try to put their experiences in this sort of box.
It’s unrealistic and somewhat arrogant to think that we can categorize people’s reaction to abuse by the type of abuse the person they have experienced. Abuse isn’t about hierarchy. Abuse is an experience and as such the reactions of its victims can only be subjective. Different people react differently to even the same type of abuse. We have enough troubles with the hierarchies we have to deal with on a daily basis in our systems. We don’t have to go around creating new ones for the youth in our care.
