Mother Also Victim When Her Child Is Abused : Study: A psychologist finds that the parent often feels grief, horror and sadness, all accompanied by deep guilt.
BOSTON — Mothers of young sexual abuse victims feel their children’s pain as keenly as if they had been assaulted themselves, according to a study.
And, like many sexual assault victims, mothers tend to shoulder the blame for the assaults. “All of the women felt guilty about what happened to their children,†said psychologist Carolyn Newberger, who directed the three-year Victim Recovery Study at Children’s Hospital in Boston.
Typically, she said, moms felt they should have prevented the abuse “even when there wasn’t realistically any way they could have known about it.â€
Newberger’s team studied 46 mothers whose children had been severely abused, many of them repeatedly. State Department of Social Services investigators confirmed all the cases.
The children were 6 to 12 years old. About 75% were girls. About a third had been abused by a father, stepfather or the mother’s boyfriend; another third were abused by another child, such as a sibling or neighbor; most of the rest were molested by another relative or another trusted adult.
Only two were abused by strangers, Newberger said, a percentage other researchers called typical.
Newberger’s team interviewed the mothers three times over the first year after the abuse was disclosed, then followed a smaller group of mothers for an additional two years.
In the few months after learning of the abuse, most women showed symptoms of “severe emotional distress,†including paranoia, hostility, depression and anxiety, said Newberger, also an associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
Therapists who have treated victims’ mothers observed similar reactions. “They go through phases, as people who are grieving go through phases,†said psychologist Elizabeth Wharff, director of the sexual abuse treatment team at Franciscan Children’s Hospital and Rehabilitation Center.
Usually, Wharff said, mothers feel grief, horror and sadness, all accompanied by deep guilt. Because many abuse cases involve relatives, mothers also reported feeling isolated from family members who might otherwise offer support.
For example, Newberger said, “a grandmother may choose to believe her son’s protestations of innocence rather than her granddaughter’s allegations of abuse.â€
Linda Braun, a professor of family studies at Wheelock College, said mothers typically feel like failures. “There’s a sense that you have not fulfilled your major responsibility as a parent, which is to protect your child from harm.â€
To complicate matters, children sometimes hold their mothers responsible.
“Oftentimes, they’re more angry at their mothers than their fathers because they believe their mothers colluded and didn’t do anything about it,†Braun said.
By the end of Newberger’s 12-month study, symptoms declined for the group as a whole as individual women began to feel better. But about a third--primarily those who had themselves been sexually abused as children--continued to suffer.
Even two and three years later, many mothers continued to feel unusually anxious and suspicious. Meanwhile, many mothers reported that others who know about the abuse are equally suspicious of them.
“There are many, many prejudices against women whose children are abused, many presumptions of guilt,†said Newberger, who is writing a book on the findings of her study.
In one case, a woman’s family was ostracized after she reported that a respected scout leader molested her children. “People in the community turned against them,†Newberger said. “No one believed the children.â€
Women also reported despair and confusion over the unfamiliar terrain of social service investigation, court appearances and, in cases where the husband was the abuser, divorce proceedings and custody fights.
Mothers who did recover universally cited support from therapists, victim-witness advocates, social workers, police officers or members of parental support groups.
Some families reported that, through therapy, their families became closer. “Many parents say that they are closer to their children, they talk more to their children, they feel their children talk more to them,†Newberger said.
