10 May 2006
	Help for Adult Victims Of Child Abuse. A non-profit making organisation based in the UK dedicated to provide help, support and information to any adult who is suffering from past childhood abuse.

Abused Because of Deafness?
by Marge Elder (hearing)

Are deaf children particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse? Therapeutic professionals engage in heated debate when this question is raised, a debate based on concerns that underlie many discussions in the field of deafness and mental health. At issue is whether deafness itself is THE cause of a given problem, just one of the many interactive factors of the cause, or perhaps no cause at all, according to Robert Pollard, Ph.D., University of Rochester psychologist and advocate of cross-cultural ethics when conducting research in the Deaf community. This issue comes into sharp focus when therapeutic professionals discuss the relationship between deafness and sexual abuse.

Some therapists say that communication barriers increase a deaf child's vulnerability to sexual abuse in several ways. First, such barriers can have an effect on a child's emotional security, they say. Approximately ninety percent of deaf children have hearing parents. Florrie Burke, M.Ed., M.A., clinical director of the University of California San Francisco Center on Deafness says, "Communication is not easy for the young and deaf, except if parents are Deaf. As with all children, there is a need for acceptance, a need to be liked .... the deaf child might not be getting those needs met."

Pollard does not consider the ability to communicate through sign language a prerequisite for effective parenting of deaf children. However, he says, the sense of powerlessness parents might feel at the diagnosis of deafness, as well as the fear that they are incompetent to raise a deaf child, can affect the parent-child relationship.

Children whose emotional needs are not being met by their family might be more vulnerable to perpetrators, who can take
advantage of the child's desire for closeness, therapists suggest. For example, some of one counselor's clients say that sexual abuse brought a sense of "specialness" and a ". . . crossing over the boundary of being deaf into I'm OK because this is happening. I must be attractive to a hearing person."

Does this mean that deaf children are more likely to be abused than hearing children because communication barriers
affect their relationships? Some therapists say yes. Tovah Wax, Ph.D., NTID/RIT Staff chair disagrees, stating that the emphasis does not belong oncommunication barriers. Healthy parent-child relationships are determined by the mental health of the parents, she says. Deafness is not the issue but only a compounding factor along with other factors that apply to any child, hearing or deaf.

A second issue therapists raise with reference to communication barriers concerns knowledge of sexuality. According to John M. Scanlan, MD., psychiatrist and consultant to Boys Town National Research Hospital in Omaha, Nebraska, deaf children have fewer ways in which to learn about sexuality than hearing children. They do not, for example, overhear conversations and must rely heavily on what their parents and teachers tell them. These people might not even know the sign language used to communicate information about sexuality, Scanlan says. Therefore, deaf children's understanding of "good and bad [or secret] touch" is limited, making them more vulnerable to perpetrators.

Therapists who work with deaf survivors of sexual abuse say that childhood understanding of sexuality does vary widely
among their clients. Some clients have said that when they were being abused, they thought the same thing happened to all children. One 15-year-old girl came to her school counselor after a human sexuality class and said, "I have just found out it is not OK for my father to have sex with me." Still other people say they knew immediately that what was done to them
was wrong.

Are these stories any different from those hearing survivors tell? Some therapists who work in the field say yes, others disagree. Wax vehemently takes issue with Scanlan's contention that deaf children have fewer ways of learning about sexuality, saying that deaf children have "different" ways of learning. Children learn visually and experientially, and most know the difference between "good" and "bad [secret]" touch, she says, pointing out that not all deaf children are
sexually abused.

One Deaf survivor offers a different perspective on the relationship of communication differences and sexual abuse. She wonders if perpetrators seek out deaf children because she or he thinks they won't be able to tell about the abuse.

In addition to their concerns about the effects of communication barriers, some therapists believe that what they call the "conditioned compliance" of children who attend residential schools for the deaf makes the children easy targets for abuse. Patricia M. Sullivan, Ph.D., clinical director of the Center for Abused Handicapped Children at Boys Town National Research Hospital, says that school residents ". . . are trained from early on to do what authority figures in the schools
tell them to do." She believes that perpetrators who work in the schools take advantage of compliant children.

U of R psychologist Robert Pollard takes issue with what he considers to be Sullivan's generalization, saying that
authoritarian power plays a role in any teacher-child relationship and has nothing to do with deafness. "It is fine to hypothesize that a given individual has conditioned compliance," he says, "but one does not say that because the individual belongs to a class [residential school students], that conditioned compliance is necessarily the case." Pollard believes that
such statements are not only untrue from a scientific standpoint, ". . but it is terribly, terribly damaging in cross-cultural relationships to assert that in a scientific publication or a lecture. . . ." He adds that such assertions ignore individual differences and tend to label deaf people as a group.

The intensity of the debate about the relationship between sexual abuse and deafness suggests the controversy will not end any time soon. However, two women who were abused when they were children cut through the philosophical considerations when each said bluntly, "If I weren't deaf, I would not have been sexually abused." Their reasons? They were abused in circumstances related to speech training, situations they would not have been in if they were hearing.

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