ABSTRACT
There are three main parties in cases of child sexual abuse: the female partner of the offender, the offender and the child.1 There is a deep inequality in how these parties are regarded and treated. It is common for the public to see child sexual abuse in stark shades of black and white, and this is appropriate in that the abuse of a child is always wrong. Most attention is given to child victims, because their situation is the most dreadful and severe. Much attention is also (rightly) focused on offenders. The intention of this book, however, is to look at how child sex abuse
affects the woman who is the partner of the perpetrator and whose child is often his victim. It is she who is the most neglected of the three parties. This neglect is reflected by the amount of literature devoted to each. The literature on child abuse – theory, practice, research – tends to be overwhelmingly about children as victims, understandably and rightly so. Many volumes, too, have been written about perpetrators. By contrast, there is very little about non-abusing mothers and female partners of sex offenders. This neglect is also reflected in the most important area of concern: treatment.
It is true that most children who have been abused do not receive adequate (if any) treatment and so may never fully recover from their experience, with often devastating consequences in later life. While most offenders never get to court, of those who do only a minority of offenders receive any kind of treatment and so they frequently return to the world with the experience of prison and not much more. The consequences of this can be devastating, by leading to further unsatisfactory and often abusive relationships and reoffending. But for both some victims and some perpetrators there is some treatment and, importantly, there is a widespread recognition that there is not enough treatment and that more ought to be made more widely available. With mothers this is not the case. Even when innocent of any wrongdoing,
they often not only suffer guilt by association with the offender, but are sometimes thought to be involved in the abuse, if only because “she must have known”. Yet their needs are frequently dismissed or overlooked and no thought is given to addressing them. After all, what needs do they have? It is the child who has the greatest need and, after that, it is the offender who needs treatment, even within the confines of prison walls.
