The center's Wolf says they believe that with early intervention, they can break the cycle. "There's a lot of self-loathing, that's our biggest intervention with these kids." But they don't know for sure. "We've only been doing a lot of intervention. We're trying to do more research. We need to know what works, what do we need to do more," Wolf says.
The point of the T-shirt project, Wolf says, is to bring the problem to the forefront. "This is what you're doing. This is the damage being done."
Deron Neblett
A T-shirt with the Spanish word for "sad" is part of the project.
Deron Neblett
Wolf has worked with sexually abused children for ten years and still doesn't see the answers.
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Conley says many times adults, including teachers, don't think they have to report child sexual abuse. "You don't have to prove it. You don't have to be right. But you do have to report it," he says.
With all the fears about sex education in the schools, Conley says, sex has a mystique and a taboo to it that tells kids clearly that it is something to keep secret. Telling children about how to protect themselves from sexual abuse is supposed to be happening at home, he says, but it's not. Conley wants schools to start taking on the task.
Children should be educated first, to keep themselves safe sexually and then to feel comfortable enough to tell someone if they are abused, Conley says. And therein lies one of the saddest things about this whole philosophy of dealing with the sexual abuse of children: It all rests on the child.
The child is supposed to know what to do to protect herself.
It is up to the child to report being abused to someone other than the parent, uncle, grandfather, family friend, teacher or stranger who did the abusing.
It's up to the child to determine that what is happening is a perversion of the love that every child has a right to have in his or her life.
"I'd like to shift the focus from making the kids tell to stopping the offenders," Wolf says. "As a community, as a system, we're putting the responsibility on the kids. A lot of them can't handle those decisions. How do you tell someone, 'My dad slept with me last night'?"
"I've been doing this ten years, and I still don't see the answers."
With the T-shirts, with the continued work at the Children's Assessment Center, Wolf and Conley hope to tear up the taboos that so conveniently allow child sexual abuse to flourish and to force all of us -- however uncomfortable it may be -- to face the fact that our system isn't working.
Adults need to take on the burden that kids have been shouldering for too long. There needs to be better sex education. There needs to be more listening to kids, our own and others. We need to get far more upset about the silences and far less worried about "indelicate" subjects. We need to shine some light on the darkness.
And then maybe a pretty young woman like Tina won't be frozen in limbo, dreaming of a prom she's too scared to go to.
