Suffer the little children

As two high-profile cases of children sexually abusing other children make headlines, JAN CORBETT asks psychologists how these young offenders are created.

Dr Ian Lambie, psychologist and psychology lecturer, has just returned from a hiking trip with a group of boys who have one horrible thing in common - they have sexually abused other children, girls younger and more vulnerable than themselves.

Taking these boys camping and tramping is part of their treatment. Therapy is boring, smiles Lambie, and 50 minutes of self-analysis almost unendurable for boys.

A few days in the bush is not only a chance for them to talk openly about the terrible thing they have done, but for their counsellors to assess their social skills and how they behave with their peer group.

If recent trends are any indication, Lambie will be donning his tramping boots more often in the future.

Experts disagree about whether the rate of children sexually abusing other children is rising, but they do agree it is being reported at a greater rate. And not just to social workers or police, but to a wider audience, thanks to the parents of the victims raising hell about it.

Certainly the parents' voices have been at full volume over the cases of six girls at St Joseph's Primary School in Upper Hutt who claim to have been sexually abused by a group of seven boys, and a Dunedin mother alleging her daughter was digitally penetrated by two 12-year-old girls in the playground.

Figures from the Child Youth and Family Service identify 160 sexual offenders aged from 12 to 16 in the year to June last year, up from 117 the previous year, although not dissimilar to the figure for the year before that.

CYFS spokesman Stephen Ward is anxious that these figures are not used to obscure the fact that it is adults who commit most of the sexual offending against children.

Still, the idea beggars belief that children, who we don't expect to really know about sex, are not only doing it, but are using it to victimise and assert control over children they know.

Yet at least half of today's adult sexual offenders began when they were children or adolescents.

When adults commit sexual offences we consider they alone are to blame. When children do it, society demands a more searching explanation.

After five years of research, Lambie this week released the results of his study of a group of 482 adolescent sex offenders who have been through the rehabilitation programme run by SAFE.

He found the majority (68.9 per cent) came from broken families, although more than half (55 per cent) lived with two parent figures.

Fewer than half (39.4 per cent) had been sexually abused themselves and 43.8 per cent had been physically abused. At 24 per cent, young Maori are over-represented in relation to the size of their population.

While Lambie believes children who are sexually abused can be found across the socio-economic spectrum, those he deals with carry all the baggage we associate with at-risk children.

They come from violent homes with too much alcohol, drugs and criminal behaviour and where children are largely ignored.

At the end of the 1990s, CYFS senior psychologist Sue Lightfoot dedicated her master's thesis to discovering the key difference between children from problem homes who had been referred to the service for other reasons and those who were sexual abusers.

Significantly, she found the sexual abusers were no more likely to have been sexually abused themselves than those who had other problems.

Yet they were more likely to have suffered verbal and physical abuse than those in the other group.

But what really set them apart was that they had suffered what Lightfoot calls "a disrupted relationship with their main caregiver". That might not necessarily have been a parent.

And it wasn't always from circumstances that could have been avoided. Sometimes it was their caregiver having to go into hospital for an extended period and the child being cared for by someone else.

These children tended not to have a reliable support network beyond their immediate caregiver. They were also children who did not talk openly about their problems.

Lightfoot also found that in older children the abuse had a sexual motivation, whereas in younger children "it's not sexual, it's acting out distress".

But perhaps the most disturbing of all is that all 20 of the abusers she studied had been introduced to sexually explicit material either at home or by their peers.

"And I'm not talking about watching Friends on television," says Lightfoot, "but pornographic material."

Lambie has no doubt that repeated exposure to pornography and violent video games changes people's perceptions, perhaps more so in young malleable minds. By how much will depend on the other factors that control behaviour, such as parental boundaries and the family's value system.

In the rare 10 per cent of cases where there are no immediate environmental reasons that explain why a boy has become a sexual abuser, Lambie has to address the bigger issues of how boys are socialised and the ideas they have absorbed about what it is to be a male in this world. And it is predominantly males who are sexual abusers.

While there is concern about the amount of sex that children are exposed to in television, films, video games and music lyrics, Lambie says none of these young abusers has had too much formal sex education, rather too little.

They not only have few parental boundaries, but no one has ever talked to them about the emotional and social responsibilities that go with sex, let alone the basic issue of mutual consent.

Yet when these boys reach Lambie's therapy sessions, they already know what they did was wrong and are ashamed of it.

Their victims were mostly younger than 10 years and were either members of their own family (43.2 per cent), part of their extended family (31.3 per cent), or were known to them (55.6 per cent.) Most of the sexual abuse (87.3 per cent) was indecent touching. More than half (57.6 per cent) used force.

It's the use of force, says Nicola Atwool, senior lecturer in community and family studies at Otago University, that distinguishes children who sexually abuse from those who sexually experiment. According to Lambie, some children who engage in sexual touching have simply never been told not to.

And while children have always done that to greater or lesser degrees, Atwool is still surprised that children appear to becoming sexualised at younger and younger ages. In her child psychotherapy work, she sees girls of 8 or 9 whom she considers "alarmingly aware" about sex.

"The thing that worries me," she says, "is that it's a strong theme on television very early in the day."

Treatment for young sex abusers, however, has nothing to do with turning the television off. Therapy is about getting these boys to admit their wrongdoing, understand the factors that have contributed to it and develop coping strategies for when they feel the impulse coming on, and to learn to empathise with their victims.

Plus, of course, they get taught appropriate and inappropriate sexual behaviour.

These programmes for young sex abusers have been running in Auckland since 1989. Lambie says about 13 per cent who have been through the treatment re-offend. The re-offenders are the ones more likely to have been victims themselves.

Overall, he says, treatment works. And while he says they also have to suffer some retribution for their crime, he does not advocate the American way of jailing these young men and boys. Those with the best chance of rehabilitation are those who are placed with a stable caregiver.

The efficacy of treatment programmes for these young offenders is the main reason that Detective Senior Sergeant Stuart Allsopp-Smith, of the police child abuse and paedophile squad, urges people to take sexual abuse by children seriously.

"Don't ignore it," he urges. "Look at it for what it is and seek assistance. These are the years that you can make the biggest difference with kids."