How Child Sexual Abuse Silences Non-Abused Siblings

Teresa Huizar: Hi, I’m Teresa Huizar, your host of One in Ten. In today’s episode, How Child Sexual Abuse Silences Non-Abused Siblings, I speak with Dr. Rosaleen McElvaney, clinical psychologist and lecturer of psychology at Dublin City University. Now we know that family support after abuse is critically important to helping victims heal from child sexual abuse, and while much research has been focused on caregiver or parental support, typically for most of us, the longest running familial relationship is actually with our siblings. Too little research has been done on sibling relationships and up to now, virtually none from the point of view of the non-abused sibling. How does the experience by one sibling or more than one sibling of child sexual abuse affect perceptions of closeness by those adult siblings that weren’t abused? What’s the impact of abuse on emotional support provided by non-abused siblings to those who were in fact harmed? And most importantly, because child sexual abuse affects everyone in a family, how do we support all those who need our help?

I know you’ll find this conversation as interesting and important as I did. Please take a listen.

Hi Rosaleen, welcome to One in Ten.

Rosaleen McElvaney: Thank you Teresa and thank you so much for the invitation. It’s a real honor to be invited and delighted to be able to talk to you about my research.

TH: I was very excited about your research. I have to tell you, because we don’t see a lot of research on sibling relationships in general as it relates to child sexual abuse.

And so I was particularly interested in this one, which explores really the sibling relationship. So I’m curious: what gave you the idea to pursue this topic? Why were you interested in the impact of child sexual abuse on sibling relationships?

RM: Good question, and I have to say I can’t take full credit for it at all.

Most of my research has been actually in disclosure and children’s experiences of disclosing sexual abuse. But a number of years ago, I was approached and asked to sit on a supervisory panel for a student who was doing her doctorate in clinical psychology, and she was looking at sibling relationships and in particular siblings experiences.

And she was linking in with an organization here in Dublin, One in Four, who provide support, and they’re probably one of the few organizations that I’m familiar with that actually provide support to siblings as well as the individuals themselves who have experienced childhood sexual abuse. And I was approached to join their supervisory panel because of my experience in the field and my, you know, expertise doing research in this field. And that’s actually what brought me into this whole zone of siblings and what it’s like for siblings. And that was a small qualitative study, Crabtree, et al. And she interviewed five non-used siblings, and I was so fascinated by the interviews and the findings, which are really resonated in the research that I’ve done since.

But that’s actually where the idea came from. And then there was an opportunity where there was an anonymous donation to that same organization actually. Where someone was really interested in funding some research, specifically looking at siblings experiences. And again, then I was approached and asked if I would be interested in taking that on.

So, as I said, I can’t take credit for coming up with the idea. But I was really impressed when I did kind of immerse myself in particularly the interviews with those five non-abused siblings that Elaine Crabtree interviewed some years ago now.

TH: Well, this is the first time I have ever heard of a donor sponsoring a study on this topic.

And I mean, I’m astounded and pleased to hear that’s how this originated because I think that I would love to see more of that. But I’m wondering just to sort of level set the conversation and because I thought that your paper did a really good job of sort of laying out the literature on, sort of family relationships in general and child sexual abuse and the way in which they can shift and change over time based on that. I’m curious about this piece, because your study really specifically looked at the non-abused sibling as an adult, right? So reflecting back. So talk about a little bit the sort of stressors that non-abused siblings can experience in the context of child sexual abuse of a sibling.

RM: And indeed it’s not just sexual abuse because we have, we do have some literature that looks at, for instance, siblings of young people with mental health difficulties or siblings in a family, whether it’s been loss or bereavement. So we did have something to go on, but I think one of the things that we mention in our article is that this is really a neglected area.

You know, obviously most of the research has been done on the individuals who have experienced the abuse, and rightly so. And then we have a body of research that looks at parents, and that’s really kind of, I suppose, recognizing the importance of the parent-child relationship. But we know from theory and literature on sibling relationships that actually in many cases, sibling relationships, they’re even more important than parent-child relationships. So I suppose it’s really in recognition of that they have been neglected, I think, in clinical services because many services only provide individual counseling, group therapy, et cetera, to those who have been abused. Some, particularly child services may include the family in the intervention and they may provide family therapy, but siblings are largely neglected in clinical services.

And then of course, we see that in the literature as well. I think when that student, Elaine first did her study, I think there was one other published study of adult non-abused siblings experiences that she could find anywhere in the literature. And I think one of the themes that has come up through our research, and I have even been contacted by people after I’ve published those articles and from individuals talking about how much they appreciate that this research is being done, that they feel silenced, they felt, always felt almost guilty for them to put themselves forward and say, you know, what about me? You know, this has had an impact on me, but nobody seems to notice and, and it’s almost like I don’t have permission to speak out and talk about my experiences because it’s almost as if it detracts from the experience of the person who was abused.

TH: I think that’s such an interesting point and really resonant because I think that we do, when we think about the crisis intervention that happens when a child discloses child sexual abuse immediately, of course there’s so much attention that’s directed towards protecting them, making sure they’re safe, making sure that other children in the family are safe, but not necessarily around the ongoing services to those kids.

Because there’s also a lot of attention on what supports the caregiver needs to be able to provide support to their family. You know, all these many things where we’re just trying to, I dunno. I’ve often said when abuse happens, especially in a family, but not exclusively there, when there’s a child disclosure, it’s like a bomb going off in the family.

I mean, it just affects everything. And so it’s interesting that not only are I think these adult non-abused siblings saying, I sort of felt like I got lost in all of that, but the literature is reflective of that, right? That there’s just this gap, and so it’s wonderful that you all were making a real effort to try to feel that somewhat.

Can you talk a little bit about the specific research questions that you went into this with. Because, you know, there are lots of things you could have explored, but where did you start when you’re thinking about doing such foundational work in an area that had not been previously explored very well?

RM: I think our research question really came from that first qualitative study, even though it was such a small study, some of the findings that came through from those interviews really highlighted this issue of changes in relationships within the family. So the family relationships being impacted by the sexual abuse, but actually as is always the case in child sexual abuse because most individuals don’t disclose until adulthood.

It’s actually focused around the disclosure rather than the abuse itself. So it’s interesting when you talk about the bomb going off for many adults, the bomb is the disclosure, not necessarily the sexual abuse incident or series of incidents. You know, there’s a lot of implications of that in terms of the person who was abused, feeling responsible for landing this bomb in the family because they managed to keep it secret for many years.

And now they have launched the bomb, when in fact the bomb was the sexual abuse, not, but it ends up being the disclosure.  The research question really came from those interviews of people talking about how relationships in the family changed after the disclosure. So in some cases, people talked about now they were finally able to make sense of their sibling and why their sibling behaved in the way they did now that they thought back over their childhood and growing up, they began to realize and you know, join the dots and began to see, oh, that’s why that happened.

And, oh, that actually makes sense now. And then feeling closer to their sibling as a result of that and feeling, you know, more empathy, feeling better understanding of their difficulties, and perhaps feeling a little bit more forgiving if you like, particularly if their sibling was very distressed or acting out, or, you know, behaving in a way that was causing disruption in the family.

That they were able to feel more empathic and more forgiving of their siblings behavior. In other findings from that study related to the impact on the wider family relationship. So if it was an uncle, for instance, who abused their sibling, the family splitting up, you know, some people in the extended family siding with the person who perpetrated the abuse and other members of the family siding with the person who had experienced the abuse, and how that impacted on family gatherings, how it impacted on parents, particularly because we’re talking about adults, particularly aging parents, and how the non-abused sibling was trying to, if you like, mediate all these kind of conflicts in relationships, you know, piggy in the middle, particularly if it was a sibling who had abused their non-abused sibling.

For some people feeling quite empathic towards their sibling who had perpetrated the abuse and for others not speaking to them at all, not wanting to go to any family gatherings that they attended. So much richness came out of that original qualitative study that really kind of raised this question for us.

You know, what is this we’re dealing with? What are these changes that take place, if at all, in sibling relationships following disclosure? And of course, because that study had been such a small study, we were really keen to open it out to much larger population. And that’s why we thought about doing it as an online survey.

TH: I really loved the fact that you did open that up nationally. Can you just talk a little bit about, and I loved by the way, the sort of demographic details that you had, the charts in the paper, and I thought there was some interesting things to glean from who decided to actually complete the survey, or at least largely complete it.

But at any rate, can you just talk a little bit about what the design of this project was and then kind of delve into any kind of things that either surprised you or you know, maybe it wasn’t a surprise, but you’re like, yep, that confirmed something that we’ve been wondering about just even in the demographics of your study respondents?

RM: Something I want to come back to later, but probably, it really was a challenge to recruit participants for this study, and we were really surprised and taken aback at the low response rate, given the prevalence of sexual abuse in Ireland. You know, there are a lot of siblings out there. There are a lot of non-abused siblings out there.

We were really, really disappointed with the low uptake and we really went to the ends of the earth in terms of our efforts at recruitment and really pushed it out. National radio, local radios, newspapers, et cetera.  But to come back to your question in terms of the design was very much influenced by that small qualitative study in terms of the questions that we asked.

And we looked around because we were interested in changes in relationships. We were really interested in closeness, because again, some of that qualitative data that came out of that original study talked about feeling closer to my sibling now. Or feeling more distant because now I don’t know whether to bring it up or not.

I don’t know whether it’s upsetting for them. And so this has in some way created a barrier between us because I’m walking around on eggshells. I don’t know whether to ask them about it, whether to name it, whether to approach them. I don’t know whether they wanna be left alone or if they want contact.

So all of these things that were coming up from that qualitative study, we, if you like, packaged as questions in our survey and we were really interested in those demographic pieces. Because again, looking at other research on sibling relationships, you know, some, some of that research talks about favoritism within families.

Some of it talks about, you know, family size, gender, age, differences between siblings. So these are all factors that influence sibling relationships in general. So we wanted to bring those into the study and ask those kinds of questions so that we would later be able to do the analysis of, we thought we were going to have this wonderful big data set and we would be able to do wonderful statistical analysis, looking at those demographic variables and seeing does that actually make a difference?

TH: Well, let’s talk about the difficulty in recruitment, because it sounds like that was one of the biggest surprises of this study for you, that you know, this is an issue that certainly has been discussed in Ireland and there have been, you know, media reports and other things about large institutional abuse cases and other kinds of things, much like in the US. I mean, we may have a longer history of some of that because I think our media has been covering child sexual abuse cases now for many, many years in a very consistent, I guess, I mean you really can’t read a paper in the newspaper here in the US without reading some child sexual abuse story.

And so one of the things that made me wonder about your point about recruitment is I wonder if it would be equally difficult here, you know, we have at least 40 years of a great deal of emphasis on this topic in the public domain, you know?

RM: Yeah. Well I do know that I have colleagues in Poznan in Poland who are running the same survey.

TH: Oh, wonderful.

RM: And they are having equal difficulty. And they came back to us a few times looking for more ideas of, you know, and I just thought it was so interesting. I suppose the similarities between our countries is that we’re both predominantly Catholic countries.

And I did wonder about that, whether that has any impact it was the only thing I could think of that we had in common in that respect, Poland is a much more densely populated country than, than Ireland. But I think first of all, there’s the issue about recruiting for people starting at all.

But the only thing that we could really comment on was that even though I think it was 152 people started the survey, only 99 completed it.

TH: Yes. Wasn’t that interesting that something either triggered them or something along the way?

RM: It wasn’t even the questions in the sense that they hadn’t even got, as far as the questions on sexual abuse when they withdrew, because we looked at that and we tried to see was there any pattern in terms of when people stopped answering questions.

So 99 completed it. But even the 99 didn’t answer all the questions, so there definitely is something about people’s reluctance to engage or maybe distress, maybe it just brings up, you know, evokes distressing feelings and that’s just something we can only speculate about because of course we just don’t know.

TH: Right. Well, you don’t know why someone doesn’t answer a question, right?

RM: Yeah. But it’s so interesting. I actually was really surprised because I thought, again, if we’re thinking about the people who feel silenced, if we’re thinking about the people who feel they have not had a platform and they haven’t had a voice, we were providing a platform, we were providing an opportunity, and yet for whatever reason, they weren’t able to avail it or it was too much. I don’t know.

TH: So interesting. Well, as it gets replicated elsewhere, I will be so interested in not only participation rates, but whether any of the findings you have shift across those various sites and for whatever reasons.

But one of the things that I was really sort of curious about because you really looked at issues of closeness and you know, I wanna talk a little bit in a minute about kind of how that gets defined. ’cause I think otherwise it sort of seems like inherently a little subjective. But also contact, the amount of contact that they had with the, between the non-abused sibling and the abused one, and then also emotional support.

And I think, you know, if you had asked me prior to reading the study, I would’ve seen those things as more closely connected than they really turned out to be in the study. So can you talk about that? ’cause like if you were to say what surprised you in the study, the fact that these seem to operate independently of each other in some ways, was very surprising to me.

RM: Yes. And you know, we struggled a little bit to find ways of measuring, if you like, closeness in research. So we kind of had to come up with our own bespoke way of looking at it. But we kind of drew on how these terms are conceptualized and operationalized in the literature.

So we were very much relying on previous literature on closeness in relationships. So I guess what we tried to do was come at it from different directions. So one of the measures that we used was these kind of concentric circles. So some of the circles are close together and overlapping, and some of them are a little bit distant, and we asked the participant to tick whichever pair of circles best represented how they would define closeness in their relationship.

So that was one way we captured it. The other ways is, as you’ve mentioned, we looked, and again, this was coming from the literature in terms of how closeness was defined in the literature level of contact, the emotional support, behavioral support and feelings about the other person.

So those four. We devised questions based on those four concepts, if you like, and as we discussed in the paper, this finding that we had of overall people felt closer to their sibling following disclosure, but people felt closer to them if the abuser was extra familial than if they were intrafamilial, but they had more positive feelings towards them if they were intra familial.

TH: What do you make of that?

RM: Yeah, I mean we try to unpack that a little bit as you see in the article and thinking about sibling relationships. So we have issues going on like obligation. So, you know, obligation within a family in terms of people looking after each other in terms of people taking that protective stance and feeling protective of their sibling because, and then again, this is all speculation, but we’re trying to bring in all these other dynamics that we know that we’re familiar with in terms of sexual abuse.

So some people talked about feeling guilty that they weren’t there for their sibling, weren’t able to protect them and weren’t able to prevent it happening, even though they themselves may have been children at the time. And they understand that’s not actually real or realistic, that they could have done anything but with the mind, if you like, of an adult, of course, they’re thinking, maybe I could have done something to help. Maybe I could have stopped it. And that can draw them closer together in terms of feeling more positively towards their sibling. But we also have that other piece going on of the impact of the sexual abuse on the abused sibling.

Our participants talked about people being very disruptive, being very attention seeking, very unwell, being very conflictual, being very demanding, falling out with family members because perhaps they didn’t side with them enough or they didn’t feel supported enough, even though the non-abused sibling may have felt they did everything they could.

You have all these kind of dynamics going on in the family where perhaps there is a sense of feeling positive towards them. But in terms of closeness is interpersonal. It takes two people. It’s a two-way street, isn’t it? We don’t know, but maybe people didn’t feel they were getting something back from their abused sibling that would constitute closeness in the relationship as opposed to feeling positively towards them, wanting to help them, emotionally, supporting them doing things for them.

TH: You know what I wondered about, and again, you know, we’re just speculating here, but what I wondered about with this is part of closeness relates to trust. And one of the things that we know about child sexual abuse is it’s so damaging to the survivor’s sense and understanding of trust.

And so there’s also this piece about whether, while someone is still struggling with issues of trust. You know, closeness is, as you say, is a two-way street. So there can also be this enormous disruption for a survivor and their ability to trust anyone. And part of their healing is sort of figuring out that trust is a continuum and that, you know, there’s a way to rebuild a sense of that.

And it’s not an all or nothing thing, but I think especially for survivors that have not had good evidence-based treatment. That can stay disrupted, I mean, a lifetime. And so I wonder if this issue around closeness has any relationship to just the complete disruption and damage to the ability to form trusting relationships. And the way that that has impact on closeness. Again, it’s just a curiosity.

RM: I’m just, sorry I didn’t have this conversation with you before I wrote that article.

I think that’s a very good point because it’s interesting, I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole at one point looking at attachment.

And how the attachment relationship is impacted by abuse, and then how that impacts people in terms of their, certainly we have some research on intimate relationships and how that damage to the attachment, which is really the trust. It’s really the ability to trust, the capacity to trust.

And then as you say, if the person who has been abused, if their capacity to trust has been so damaged, that will impact on their sibling relationships because as you, you know, it’s, it’s reciprocal. It goes two ways. So again, that people, you know, non-abused siblings may feel more positive towards their abused sibling, but do they trust them as much?

TH: Well, and I wonder too, I think there’s always this question among siblings, but especially adult ones, about how can I help? Like there are some problems that can happen within a family where you can provide support and you can be in contact and those things, but at the end of the day, it’s not gonna be a substitution for  treatment, for example.

And I think that kind of sense of responsibility that siblings can feel toward their abused sibling. And they know they can’t “fix,” and I’m putting that in air quotes, what happened, but at the same time, there’s this tremendous desire to try to make things better. And so I wonder also if that’s another factor here is that if you feel that you somehow want to fix something that you do intellectually know you cannot fix. If that also kind of impairs this, because just in listening to you talk about some of the quotes, some of it being sort of like, I really wanted to help, or I felt a sense of responsibility, but I’m not sure what to do.

I mean, some of it is that at some point it’s like that isn’t your work to do. It’s not something that is fixable by you.

RM: Well, except that I would take the view that not everybody who’s been sexually abused needs therapy and needs professional intervention, and I have met many people who have, if you like, recovered or progressed along their healing journey by virtue of the relationships that they’ve experienced in their life, their positive relationships, and so that could also be sibling relationships.

That actually makes it a little bit more complicated because yes, for some people you can’t, as you say, air quote, fix it, but actually you can. You can do a lot to help the person along that healing journey. And there is great potential there in relationships.

TH: It’s complicated, isn’t it? ’cause it’s one of those things where I think we know from the literature that familial support makes a huge difference. And a lot of that, you know, and we have so many, because we have our own survey project, a youth survey about this and what’s so interesting in their comments about what they found helpful and our questions are not about siblings.

They have to do with what they find helpful about sort of the professional intervention side. Because here in the US we have Children’s Advocacy Centers. Kids are gonna get therapy unless there’s an assessment that says they don’t need it, these kinds of things. But one of the interesting things that they talk about is being believed.

That is really at the center of their comments around feeling safe and feeling more positive. Even about what can happen. And I’m talking about kids between say, 13 and 18 that we’re talking to. So we don’t know what they’ll say as adults, but we know what they’re saying right now.

And I also wonder to your point about the power of sibling relationships and the power of family relationships, aside from contact and sympathy and all of that, I think some of that may be this power of being believed that your complaint was not dismissed. And I just wonder about that.

I don’t know. It’s not in the study, but I’m just curious to your point, that yes, there are people who, you know, are wonderfully resilient and do recover, and that’s a wonderful thing, but what is powering that?

RM: Now, we did actually look at that in our survey, so we did ask questions about whether they believed their sibling.

Most people did. And a small proportion said they did in the beginning, but now they’re not sure. And then a tiny proportion said, no, not a chance. Quite a substantial proportion were missing.

TH: And isn’t that interesting that they didn’t answer it one way or the other?

RM: Yeah. So we weren’t able to look at, you know, the impact of the relationship between whether they believe their sibling and the closeness in the relationship. And if we looked at the qualitative comments, the people that, the texts that they put into the text boxes, we didn’t get much information on that that would enlighten us in terms of understanding that a little bit more.

TH: I mean, you noted the ambivalence that in some of the responses, and I suspect here too, and I think that for those of us who have worked with survivors in their families, I think we see that, you know, that so many of the conversations that we have with caregivers and I suppose with siblings, but generally we’re talking about the context of caregivers have been around this kind of initial ambivalence that people may have and the impact of that on kids.

And what I would be so curious about is for those where an adult sibling said that they believed. That they checked that box, whether in fact the survivor has the same level of confidence in that belief on the part of the non-abused sibling. You know, it’d just be interesting to see if the ratings are the same in a dyad or different.

RM: It’d be so interesting. I mean, at one point actually, we looked at the possibility of doing a qualitative study of dyads.

TH: How would you recruit that? You’re like, it’s hard enough to, a little bit of a landmine, isn’t it?

RM: Because what do you do then? Do you share the information in the sibling dyad in terms of what one person said about another, they’re gonna be able to recognize, particularly in qualitative research? You know, it’s very difficult to anonymize the data. It’s a bit of a landmine, I think. But I agree. It would be really interesting and I think while it may be very difficult to do in research, it’s not so difficult to do in clinical practice. And we do know when we bring families together like that, that it just means so much. And we also know that there can be so many misunderstandings. You know, someone can doubt that they’re believed and yet they’re completely believed.

They can equally believe that they’re believed. And then I always feel like believing has so many different layers to it. You know, I’ve met parents who’ve said, I just don’t believe it. You know? But it’s not that they don’t believe their child. It’s just they can’t get their head around that this has happened.

They still can’t accept that it has happened, but it’s not that they think their child is not telling the truth. I think even I’ve met people who, from their point of view, if you ask them did they believe their sibling, they would say, oh, yes, always, always.

But then as time goes on and they hear more information, they believe even more, and then even more, which raises the question, well, did you not believe in the first place? And they said, no, no, no. I always believed, but this now really confirms.  Which raises the question of, you know, how much information do you have to have to really believe it?

Because some of our participants actually talked about that, that they felt that they were, you know, operating in a vacuum where they knew something had happened, but because the details hadn’t been shared, they kind of felt at a loss or at a disadvantage. And they, some people talked about that impacting on their closeness in the relationship that they didn’t really know what happened and they didn’t feel they could ask any further and so that left them distant, that created that distance in the sibling relationship,

TH: Just the awkwardness of not feeling that they could communicate around these things.

RM: For both people. I mean, clearly there was a reason why the abused sibling didn’t share any more details.

And I know from working my own work with clients, sometimes they talk about, well, why do I have to share the details? Why do I have to say what happened? Do you not believe me? Can you not accept that I’ve had this experience without hearing the ins and outs, and do you want to know the ins and outs so that then you can make a decision and you can make a judgment as to whether you think that’s sexual abuse or sexual assault or whatever?

So it gets complicated, doesn’t it?

TH: It does, indeed. You know, one of the things from the sort of charts you included about your participants that I found very interesting is that first of all, in one sense, delayed disclosure is not surprising. I mean, we know that’s a factor in these cases.  Fortunately, in the US it seems to be decreasing some, at least in terms of what we can find out from our CAC clients that we see more that are disclosing within a year and not these long, long periods.

But that’s to professionals and that’s of those who come forward, right? That’s not saying what’s happening with siblings.  In yours, there were long periods. I mean, the majority was sort of within a decade, but more than a year or longer than a decade. So these were really prolonged periods of time before a sibling would find out and often they were an adult when they found out. So 17 and up, right? If I’m remembering right, the majority were anyway, or the plurality were.  So I also kind of wonder how that impacts any of these things that, in other words, it’s not that an 8-year-old child, their 13-year-old sibling, when it was happening or right after they witnessed it?

Probably there was a lot going on in the sibling relationship for a long time, and then at some point, however that happened, the survivor discloses to an adult non-abused sibling. What impact do you think that, I mean, this, again, it’s just speculation, but what impact do you think just that has on the findings that you have?

RM: Well, we certainly have qualitative data where people talked about, you know, feeling very hurt that they haven’t been told before, feeling that they thought they had a close relationship with their sibling. But we know this from parent research as well and from clinical practice that parents kind of feel, I thought they could come to me about this.

I can’t believe that they kept this for whatever period of time. So we we’re seeing the same thing in non-abused siblings accounts. Where feeling let down in some way feeling hurt.  Feeling that they thought there was a good enough relationship there, but if they really were as close as they thought they were, how come they couldn’t come to them?

It’s interesting. It comes back to that point about trust that you mentioned, you know, did they not trust me?  And did they not trust that I would support them and that I would believe them, or that I would stand by them? So, yes, absolutely. I really feel, you know, in my clinical career, I worked with adults who had been abused as children before I moved into a children’s practice.

And I was really always struck by what I regard as the damage done by having to keep the secret. This is why my PhD was all about how children tell. I’m fascinated with the whole kind of informal disclosure because I feel that there’s so much harm done by having to keep the secret.

And actually some of our participants talked about the impact on them, the non-abused siblings of still having to keep the secret. So yes, their sibling has told them that this has happened, but they’ve also told them, I don’t want you talking about it. I don’t want you telling anybody. So now they’re the holder of the secret.

They’re holding the secret, and they talk about the burden that that is and how stressful that is, that they’re go to these family occasions and they’re terrified that they’re gonna say something, that it’s gonna come out on unwittingly. So I think this whole secrecy around the sexual abuse, it’s toxic.

TH: It truly is. The other thing that I, you know, I thought it may have played a role in some of the helpful responses you got, but sort of shaped it, is that while you looked at abuse within the family, and also externally, if I’m remembering right, the majority of it was a dad or a brother, like there was a lot of it that was intra familial abuse.

And I am also wondering, you know, to find out as an adult that your sibling has been abused not by someone external to the family or an uncle or a grandparent. We are really talking about within the immediate nuclear family. I can just imagine how that would make one reevaluate a lot of things.

And I wonder if these elements around closeness  have something to do also with this sort of feeling like everything I thought about our, I knew about our family turns out not to be true.

RM: Yes. And it’s kind of your fault, isn’t it? Because if you hadn’t said this, then we had one participant, and I thought it was a lovely expression.

He talked about, it’s like having a colorful picture that black ink was thrown on.  And that’s the way he conceptualized the, I think that was actually maybe a participant in the Crabtree study. But this idea of, you know, I had a happy childhood, I had a good family, and I had these lovely memories, and now they’re all tainted.

And now I have to kind of re every time I think about childhood experiences, I have to think, oh yeah, but was the abuse going on that time? So was this, was that all just false? Was that all just, you know, fake. The betrayal and the impact that that has on people. And then of course you have, which is a lot of the time, you know, they may have been very close to that sibling, the sibling who perpetrated the abuse may also have their own mental health difficulties.

And so there may be a lot of sympathy and empathy and wanting to protect that sibling who may now be, and again, we’re talking about in adulthood who may now be very vulnerable. And in a very different power position in the family than perhaps as a younger person when they were perpetrating the activity.

So, yeah, and also I think that the parents, you know, the parent relationship, I think it’s really, really difficult in terms of, you know, someone who may have had a close relationship with their father and always adored their father and everything was hunky dory. And now that has been completely destroyed.

One person talked about, you know, our family has never been the same since the day it was said. It was shattered.  The whole family is just shattered.

TH: Well, I hope they’re placing the responsibility for that shattering where it actually belongs. Do you know?

RM: Right. Yeah. This is the complicated piece of it.

This is why it’s such a struggle, I think, for people disclosing within their  family because they know how these things quite possibly going to happen are gonna play out as a result of them telling, and that’s where I feel there’s so much of a burden responsibility placed on the person who was abused to share the secret.

TH: Manage the fallout, you know what I mean?

Because that’s the other thing that of course, the study doesn’t get at, but there’s also a lot of caretaking on the part of survivors to try to make somehow everybody feel better about what’s going on.

RM: And a lot of that secrecy is about protecting the family.

I did a study once where I interviewed adults and I interviewed children, and the children talked much more about being concerned for their parents and how upset their parents were going to be if they found this out. And the kind of protective stance that the young people took in relation to their parents.

Whereas the older people I interviewed were more afraid of their parents. They were afraid parents would blame them. They were afraid their parents wouldn’t believe them. It was quite a different dynamic, and I think it’s really to do with the passage of time. Parenting nowadays is very different from parenting 50 years ago.

People’s awareness of sexual abuse, 50 years ago, you know, parents heard these stories that “don’t be saying something like that about that nice person. That’s a terrible thing to say.” That wasn’t an unusual reaction, unfortunately.

TH: I have to hope that when this study is done, again, 50 years from now, we’ve come so far and our understanding of this and also the way that we’re treating each other and the way that we’re caring for families who are experiencing these things.

One of the joys of this conversation has been that this isn’t just a conversation about research, but it’s also rooted in your own clinical practice and experience that preceded so much of this research. So one of the questions that I have for you is thinking about all of the listeners who are almost all, professionals who deal in child sexual abuse on a daily basis.

So they’re working with survivors and their families all the time. What’s your advice based on this, what guidance you would give, based on not just this study, but sort of the sum total of your knowledge of this?

RM: Probably what I’ve learned myself from it and what I hope I’ve brought into my practice more is always think about the family.

So no matter who’s sitting in front of you. Think about the wider family and think about is there anybody else there that needs support? Is there anybody else in this family who needs to be brought in here into this space and offered some kind of support or advice or maybe directed elsewhere to another service that can provide that support?

Because I think what comes across again and again, in this area of research is, non-abused siblings feeling silenced, feeling invisible, feeling that nobody is interested in what it’s like for them and nobody is there for them to support them. I would feel, not that we need specialist services for siblings, whatever, but you know that there is support offered and an acknowledgement or recognition.

Something about seeing these people. As a professional, as a psychologist, as a psychotherapist, very often I have perhaps one child in the room or one adult in the room. And with the child, probably their parents, but not necessarily their siblings. And so just thinking about the siblings and asking about the siblings and how are they doing?

And, you know, do they need support? Even if they go home and say, oh, you know, my therapist asked about you today. You know, isn’t that nice that somebody was thinking about them?

TH: Being seen, being heard, you know, it’s just, it’s a powerful thing in and of itself, and it’s a wonderful reminder and I just love that question, you know?

Is there anyone else who needs support? Because we wanna provide that support. Well, I could talk to you all day. I know you have other things to do, but I do want to ask you, is there anything else that you wanted to make sure that we talked about today, or any question that I should have asked you and I didn’t ask?

RM: There’s something you said earlier about, that piece about, you know, the disclosure sets in motion all these series of events, and so for me there’s just something really important about the person who launches the bomb is not the person who made it. I suppose really emphasizing that, that it’s really, really difficult to sit on this information for years and it’s really, really difficult to share it.

And people should be applauded for sharing it, even though it kind of sets off the bomb.

TH: I just have so much empathy for everyone in all the many roles they have in families when child sexual abuse happens, because I think it’s one of those things where everyone wants support and care and is going to need it, and not just in the short term.

You know, one of the things that I thought was very valuable in your look at adults is that I think sometimes we think that when some time has elapsed from that, suddenly everything’s better. And it seems to me that one of the critical pieces of your study is that it points out that closeness is not a one-time measure.

Emotional support is not a one-time measure. What someone’s going to need and how they’re going to need it and how they’re gonna feel about it isn’t going to, it’s not a static thing, I guess. And that we need to be thinking about that as we’re providing services to families.

RM: Yeah. And people are getting older and more vulnerable and more sensitive perhaps to these issues.

And you know, dealing with it in your fifties is very different from dealing with it in your twenties, whether you be the person who was abused or sibling. So we need to take account of that as well. Different life stages. And I think sometimes that comes up. ’cause one of the things we asked people was, how many children do you have?

And we were kind of thinking that might be something in terms of closeness among siblings, but we didn’t get anywhere with it. But again, we didn’t have the numbers, you know? But these are all things that I think are worth thinking about and exploring and trying to find out so that we can understand better.

Going back to the question about recruitment, from a research point of view, we have to find ways of reaching out to people. We have to find ways of capturing their experiences and making sure their voices are heard. I think particularly that point about the secrecy and, and people finding it hard to speak out, this is a way that they can be heard is through these kind of anonymized surveys.

So, if I could get a message out there to people, please, you know, speak out. You know, use these opportunities to have your voice heard.

TH: Yeah. Well, I’m hoping that some of our listeners will not only pass on that message, but I’m hoping that someone will decide to replicate your study. I’m just putting this out in the universe.

RM: Yeah, that would be wonderful.

I’d be very open to collaborating. In the US because you have the Children’s Advocacy Centers and you have so many, you know, wonderful initiatives in terms of being able to reach such a broad range of people. I guess that’s the other, there was a limitation in our study we didn’t ask about race or ethnicity or anything.

We have a much more diverse society in Ireland now than we’ve had in the past. And, and we know from some of the research on disclosure that there are differences so  I think you could do that in the US. You would be able to capture that diversity better. That would be great.

TH: US listeners, reach out if you’d like to collaborate. Well, it has been just such a pleasure to talk with you and I hope that your next publication that relates to any of this, do feel free to come back anytime.

RM: Thank you so much. Thanks a million.

TH: Thanks for listening to One in Ten. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague and for more information about this or any of our other episodes, please visit our podcast website at oneintenpodcast.org.