listening to children Archives

I don’t want to talk about it… It’s too horrible. But in the end I became so frightened of her I used to start shaking when she came into the room.

So said Matilda’s teacher, Miss Honey, in Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book (Dahl and Blake, 1989, p. 198). In a simple children’s story, Dahl poignantly captures just how difﬁcult young people (and adults) ﬁnd it to talk about the abuse they experience:

I have found it impossible to talk to anyone about my problems. I couldn’t face the embarrassment, and anyway I lack the courage. Any courage I had was knocked out of me when I was young (p. 195).

The reality of that is captured in the ﬁrst paper in the latest issue of Child Abuse Review. In a review of research on disclosure of child sexual abuse, Rosaleen McElvaney (2015) highlights both quantitative data on the prevalence of non-disclosure and delays in disclosure, and qualitative data exploring the complexity and individuality of issues around disclosure. McElvaney concludes that ‘signiﬁcant numbers of children do not disclose experiences of sexual abuse until adulthood and adult survey results suggest that signiﬁcant proportions of adults have never disclosed such abuse’ (p. 161)

Continue reading “Learning To Listen: To Young People, Parents, Perpetrators”