Survivors of child sexual abuse often struggle to trust health practitioners. This lack of trust, as noted by historian Ruth Beecher, has been a consistent issue since the 1980s. In her chapter titled “Silenced Voices, Invisible Bodies: Survivor/Practitioner Encounters,” Beecher explores the role of health professionals in identifying and addressing signs of abuse.
Drawing on a range of sources from survivors, including memoirs, letters to a national inquiry, and published reports, Beecher centers survivor voices to investigate their encounters with doctors, nurses, and mental health workers.
Across her period of study, Beecher found a clear and consistent message: survivors desired someone to notice their distress, listen to them, and believe them. Instead, the majority expressed negative experiences with health practitioners, often feeling ignored and silenced.
Beecher quotes one survivor, writing:
“When practitioners ‘find out you’ve been abused, they think it’s all in your head,’ or make assumptions ‘that any health problem must be psychogenic’ without appropriate further investigation.”
This article sheds light on the long history of survivors of child sexual abuse feeling dismissed, pathologized, or ignored by mental health professionals, despite decades of training reforms and awareness campaigns. Beecher presents survivors’ words as critical evidence, revealing patterns of institutional neglect that have remained largely unchanged since the 1980s. Her work resonates with a growing body of literature by those who have lived through and often been harmed by the systems meant to help them, sometimes known as the consumer, survivor, ex-patient movement.
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Coming from this world and I have not read the article but yes and however. When hospital administrators and heads of Social Service agencies the entities changed too CEO grasped the length, depth, and width of this trauma even at a simple level their support disappeared. The regional and state systems also part of this were at first willing and then again the enormity created multiple difficulties. The interlocking systems of police, judges and lawyers or helping professionals or healthcare workers who knew or were friends with some of the named abusers created even further cracks and disintegration is a newly formed helping system. We all were so hopeful. And then the enormity and then the barriers and obstacles thrown in to stop or slow down support.
Because much of sexual abuse, ableism, racism and misogyny and the use of power, wealth, and influence as tools were ensconced in human history some and much of that knowledge hidden or suppressed.
So innocent and traumatized human beings were left in a storm tossed unreliable system. I am truly sorry for the awfulness my profession and others landed you in. We were ignorant and thought we would be helping and changing things. And some things changed and are changing but still a mess of tangles.
I really think NASW, the two APAs , ABA, and AMA and other orgs need to do a Truth and Reconciliation process for all of this.
The good is this is out there now and other voices – old suppressed works and even in these yucky times truth is coming out of all the many wells.
We also need as a global community to create life long trauma support using all the decent tools of human civilization and lay to rest and bury the tools that hurt and harmed and failed and sometimes killed people.
Outrage and many emotions. We all our survivors all of us in different ways.We humans learn through error. Our child development is a spiral of testing all the kinds and types of waters of random here I am in this particular environment.
I still think we have the option to navigate this but time is running so I hope somehow quickly.
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As the mother of a child abuse survivor, according to my child’s medical records, who was able to scare a school, that had a pedophile on its school board, to close forever, on 6.6.06.
I will say – to this day – that since the “mental health professionals” can NOT bill to actually help child abuse survivors, by DSM design.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-child-does-not-have-bipolar-disorder/201402/dsm-5-and-child-neglect-and-abuse-1
Until this paternalistic problem is changed, all child abuse survivors should stay as far away as possible, from the “invalid” DSM “bible” billers.
But I will say that since the psych industries’, the systemic primarily child abuse covering up industries, have “partnered with” the large religions, my entire family had to leave our childhood religion, seemingly forever.
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2019/01/23/18820633.php
https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/04/heal-for-life/
https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Culture-Wars-Reclaiming-Prayer/dp/1598868330
I’m one of the “widows” mentioned in the latter book’s Preface. Whose family was forced out of our lifelong religion, due to attempted thievery, by a child abuse covering up, and attempted thieving, psychologist.
But I’ll ask should all, not able to bill to help child abuse survivors, so systemically child abuse covering up DSM deluded, be trying to steal from, all mothers and grandmothers of child abuse survivors. and getting them out of their lifelong religions?
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I hope to see an end to “the dirty little secret of the two original educated professions,” and that comes from an ethical banker’s daughter, that has supposedly been keeping track of the money you worship, in our dreams.
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Why in the world would anyone trust the “helpers” when they have endured such horrors, when the very same “helpers” will then turn around and diagnose them with some personality disorder from which they never can recover.
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I have scrolled through Beecher’s article. There are many problems with it. The most important one is that she doesn’t reckognize sexualized violence against children in families and elsewhere as a proper function of Western patriarchy.
The medical and judicial systems are two of the most important pillars to uphold this power structure. When girls who disclose sexual violence are met with misogynistic hatred in these systems it is not a failure of these systems but a sign that these systems are doing their job of putting girls and women down and out of power properly.
Because children intuitively sense that it is not safe to disclose that they are experiencing violence to people who work in these systems they don’t do it. That’s very healthy and sign of functioning self-protection.
It is my experience that there are barely any people whether trained or not who are able to sit and be with a person – a child or an adult – and listen to their experiences of violence. But survivors are smart and they find support in their own communities or within themselves.
It is not true that survivors can’t find a way to deal with these experiences without a medical professional or a therapist who supports them. That’s just the self-serving illusion of therapists. Unfortunately, they have managed to convince everyone else even the historian discussed here and many survivors of that story. But it is utterly wrong.
Luckily, there is more and more survivor-led research and activism around this problem that on the side of the victims violence and abuse are conceptualized as medical problems.
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