Child Abuse - What to know

The Jewish Week by David Mandel & Dr. David Pelcovitz

Our community has to recognize that child molestation is a disease. The child molester is a sick person with an illness that he is unable to control or stop on his own. He has a preoccupation and a sexual desire for young children. In order to stop, he needs help through treatment,supervision or incarceration.

In our collective experience working with this population in the Jewish community, approximately one-third of pedophiles have a preference for boys, one-third prefer girls, and one-third have no preference. Some pedophiles also have distinct preferences within select age groups.

The article, “A Charge Of Double Betrayal In Williamsburg” (Sept. 5), about a young man, Joel Engelman, alleging he was sexually abused as a child by his principal, once again raises the important question of what can we do as parents, as educators, and as a community to protect and respond to sexual abuse.

While we do not know the people involved in the story, it is noteworthy that Engleman and his attorney, Eliot Pasik, stated they were not initially seeking a financial settlement but rather an assurance that other children would not be exposed and hurt.

Children are sexually victimized because they can be. They are trusting, vulnerable, curious by nature, and usually not suspicious of adults, certainly not of a parent, teacher, counselor or other role model. This can be true of adolescents as well, who can fall prey to sexual abuse even into their mid teens.

Children can be victimized repeatedly because they are often too ashamed or frightened to divulge information to others. Ashamed of what was done to them or what they were forced to do. Frightened because the molester threatened to hurt them or their family members, or frightened that their parents will not believe them or will blame them.

Unlike other insidious social problems such as gambling, alcohol and drug addiction, sexual abuse is not seen as an illness and still carries with it a taboo that results in a nonproductive demonization of the perpetrator and isolation of the victim.

In the last decade, a number of adolescents and young married men and women have self-identified and sought treatment for their serious problems with gambling, drugs and alcohol. While in some circumstances they may have been forced to seek help by their spouses, employers or creditors, these “addicts” have, willingly or not, sought and accepted professional help. The publicized accidental deaths by drug overdose of a number of young men, coupled with the writings of Dr. Abraham Twerski, have painfully raised our awareness and have resulted in many more individuals seeking professional treatment.

On the other hand, several deaths, accidental or suicide, resulting from depression and despondency due to sexual victimization, were not publicized.

It is fair to say that alcohol, drug, and gambling problems, serious as they are, no longer carry the social stigma and social isolation they did just a short few years ago. Not so with sexual abuse — not to the victim or to the perpetrator.

In our respective years of work at OHEL Children’s Home and Family Services and previously at North Shore University Hospital and in private practice, it’s fair to say we have met with, counseled and treated many hundreds of victims of sexual abuse and trauma.

Victims of sexual abuse, unlike other victims, almost never self-disclose.A crime victim may report to the police. A victim of domestic violence may seek out a relative, a rabbi, or a mental health professional. A drug user or alcohol binger can often be recognized by a spouse or employer. Not so with a victim of sexual abuse who is embarrassed, who represses, and who, years later, continues to carry the scars of the unresolved trauma of the abuse. So, too, with a child molester.

He (95 percent are male) will almost never voluntarily seek treatment. The fears of retribution, social isolation, physical harm, loss of family, loss of work, along with his sexual proclivities, prevent him from disclosing.[...]