Karen had remained close to her parents and, when her father became seriously ill, she shared her mother’s anxiety. However, very shortly after her father died her mother spoke of him being a wonderful man who had devoted himself to his family. Karen suddenly felt very angry. This was not like her. She did not get angry with people. Whenever something went wrong she always blamed herself. She should have tried harder, been a better person. However, now not only was she angry, she was not blaming herself for getting angry.
Karen had always found it difficult to talk about herself, so when she came to see me after her father’s death she spoke haltingly, sidling up to something rather than confronting it head on. Thus we sidled up to the question of what her father had or had not done when she was a child and a teenager. I knew that this could not be a conversation between client and therapist because I was part of Karen’s past, just as her father had been. Our conversation had to be like that of two family members who were trying to remember and understand the past. So I told Karen what I remembered of my visit to her family, and how her father had looked at me. She smiled sadly and shook her head. ‘That’s what he did to all my girlfriends. I didn’t like to invite them home.’
I did not feel it was necessary for Karen to dig in her memory for particular events and lay them out like the contents of a trunk that had stood unopened for many years. If she had had no one to talk to she and I might have done that, but she and her husband did talk to one another. They knew each other very well.
How very different Karen’s life would have been had the first doctor who saw her said to himself, ‘I wonder what’s going on in this child’s home that makes her so frightened she can hardly move?’ Nowadays most doctors would ask themselves this question, and most child psychiatrists would know that to understand why a child behaves as he does he must be looked at in the context of the family. Many, though not all, child psychiatrists and clinical psychologists know the truth of the advice I was given back in 1961. It was: ‘The presenting problem is never the real problem.’ Family therapists are no doubt well aware that the real problem has something to do with the family member who refuses to attend discussions with the therapist.
Karen’s main interest seemed to be to fill in the gaps in her family story. Until she knew the full story she would feel incomplete and thus inadequate. I gave her some of my papers from all those years ago, and she spoke to several family members whom she felt could bear the burden of uncovering family secrets. She would not speak about these matters to her mother because she did not feel that her mother, now old, could bear to be forced to remember the past.
Karen’s principal problem, as I saw it, was that her propensity to blame herself for every disaster turned the natural sadness she felt into depression. Otherwise she managed her life very well. Had she been having greater and more diverse difficulties I would have recommended that she read Carolyn Ainscough and Kay Toon’s book Breaking Free: Help for Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse?38 and perhaps join a self-help group of adult survivors. This kind of group has enabled many men and women to confront the demons from their past and defeat them. Alas, such groups are sparse, and few are a regular part of mental healthcare.
For all the people who have suffered sexual abuse in childhood to receive appropriate help, governments would have to recognize and deal with the incidence of abuse not just in families but in certain institutions. A great deal of fuss is made about strangers who prey upon children. When the News of the World printed the photographs of a number of convicted paedophiles now living in the community, there were noisy demonstrations and the homes of suspected paedophiles were attacked. What was ignored in all this was that the majority of children who suffer abuse do so at the hands of a parent or someone they know and trust. It is far worse to be abused by someone you know and trust than by a stranger. Recovery from abuse by a stranger can be relatively straightforward, though not easy, by seeing it as a chance event for which you are not responsible and do not deserve, and the offender as being completely in the wrong and meriting punishment. However, when the offender is someone in whom you have placed your trust, someone whom you love and you hope loves you, recovery is not simple. We all long for a parent who loves us and looks after us, and when our parent falls far short of the mark the longing we have for the parent they might have been can tie us to the parent who harms us. Our longing for the perfect parent can prevent us from seeing the parent who harms us as a mere human-sized human being. Instead we see this parent as looming over us, wielding massive parental power which we dare not ignore or disobey.
Powerful though a parent may seem to be, how much more powerful is a man who has access to God’s power. The Catholic Church demands from its clergy and its flock obedience and silence. Any institution which operates on principles of obedience and silence creates the conditions for the abuse of power. Catholic children were, and sometimes still are, fiercely and brutally beaten. When I was a child in Australia the Christian Brothers’ schools for boys were notorious for the priests’ brutality against the pupils. Martin McGuinness, now Minister for Education in Northern Ireland, and Conor McPherson, the brilliant young Irish playwright, have spoken of the beatings they received at Catholic schools. In recent years some Catholics have broken the order of silence and have spoken, not just of physical abuse, but of sexual abuse at the hands of priests. What started as a trickle of accounts of sexual abuse by the clergy turned into a torrent in the USA, the Netherlands, the UK, Australia and Ireland. These accounts showed how the clergy used their priestly power to coerce and silence their victims. An eleven-year-old girl told how a priest would follow an act of abuse by saying: ‘This is our secret and you mustn’t tell anybody. You are very special Sarah, very special indeed. Secrets can never be broken. However, if you do tell anyone, then God will know what you have done. Because I am a priest, God will inform me of your deed, and as a consequence you will need to be punished. I want you to remember, Sarah, if God tells me you have been naughty, I will kill you. Do you understand? I will kill you.’39
The Catholic Church was extremely slow to acknowledge that harm had been done by priests to those in their care. Following legal action by some victims, the Church has made some modest remunerations, and some dioceses have created the post of child protection officer, but the ethos of the institution has not changed. How can it when a cardinal, in the process of inauguration, ‘takes a vow of secrecy to the Pope which states: “I promise to keep secret anything confided in me in confidence that if revealed will cause scandal or harm to the Roman Catholic Church.”’40
When Monsignor James Joyce was child protection officer for the Catholic diocese of Portsmouth from 1994 to 1999, he met victims of abuse and their families. He wrote, ‘Most were in shock, stunned not only by what had happened and its effect on them, but also by the silence and denial by the Church. Many victims of abuse had their lives destroyed. They found relationships with their families and friends distorted, their sexuality confused and their whole being affected. They couldn’t understand why it had happened to them. ’41
Monsignor Joyce found that the system whereby child protection officers were priests or deacons who, as the Church requires, had made a vow of obedience to their bishop rendered them powerless. A priest or deacon cannot tell a bishop what to do. He wrote, ‘The climate in the Church is still one of denying abuse and minimising its effect, because to accept it is to open up issues about power. Parishes and dioceses can still be run on the whim of a priest or a bishop, and there is no appeal or grievance procedure in the law of the Church.’42
Media stories of abusive priests have been matched by stories about workers in care homes for children who physically and sexually abused the children in their care, and by stories of international paedophile rings whose members entrap, abuse and even murder children for their own amusement and for the creation of pornography which is now a multibillion-dollar industry. Some care home assistants and some paedophiles have been charged, and some of these have been convicted