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When stories of child sexual abuse hit the media and the victim is a teenager, or perhaps even a little younger, faulty underlying assumptions about the victim’s responsibility emerge. Many also jump to troubling conclusions when the victim is an adolescent or teenage boy.
Do child predators bamboozle you? This is the headline from an email I received from Yello Dyno.
“We’ve been bamboozled long enough. The old saying ‘out of sight, out of mind’ has become the social norm, much to the delight of child predators.”–The Yello Dyno email continues. Yes, I agree we have been bamboozled long enough by predators–and society is also being bamboozled by Yello Dyno. Yello Dyno’s focus regarding child sexual abuse looks at the sexual child abuse predator outside the family. This is totally misleading. Studies reveal that 80% of children, who are sexually abused, are abused by a family member; 19% are abused by people the child knows and trusts.
It is tragic to note that, although Oprah, herself, a sexual abuse survivor, put forth a plethora of misinformation within the interviews with both a professional and the survivors themselves. Dr. Howard Fradkin, who believes men’s sexual identity is unaffected by sexual abuse, is a tragic and unfortunate statement. There is a wealth of research confirming that sexual child abuse impacts both boys’ and girls’ sexual identity and sexual comfortableness.