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Helping Children Heal: A Trauma Expert Explains the Meaning of the Circle of Trust Reforms
Bruce Perry, M.D., Ph.D.
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Dr. Bruce Perry is one of the world's foremost experts on childhood trauma and maltreatment and a founding national advisory board member of PROTECT. He is the Senior Fellow of the ChildTrauma Academy, a not-for-profit organization which promotes innovations in service, research and education. Over the last fifteen years, he has been an active teacher, clinician and researcher in children's mental health and neurosciences, holding a variety of academic positions. Dr. Perry testified on behalf of the Circle of Trust bill, explaining the severe damage done to children when they are returned to a sexually-abusive home. In 2004, a California reporter interviewed Dr. Perry by email, seeking answers to the claims made by sex offender therapist and self-styled "incest" expert Hank Giaretto and his followers. That interview never ran. We publish it here for the first time to share Dr. Perry's very moving insight into the effects of incest on children—and the potential of Senate Bill 33 to change lives. His website is www.ChildTrauma.org.
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The effects range from situation to situation. These effects include terror, shame, depression, humiliation - but most typically it is a smouldering fear—ever present—and avoidable only by using maladaptive defenses such as drinking, cutting, dissociating by using drugs. In sum, none of the effects are, on whole, emotionally good for the child.
Victims of incest often feel guilt if their attacker, often a parent, gets put in jail as a result. How valid is the argument that this is a reason to keep families together through therapy as opposed to incarceration?
That is no reason at all. A child who feels guilty because their parent goes to jail - will also feel guilty if they resist a parent's next incestuous advance—or if they don't "please Daddy." Guilt is one of the major tools used by the offender on his child. The guilt they feel is part of the toxic and negative effects of incest. One of the truly destructive effects of incest is that it poisons and confuses primary relational interactions so much. Bottom line: these children feel guilty, shamed, degraded and used—whether the parent goes to jail or not. The only way to start helping the child start to heal is to stop the incest and create some sense of justice and safety that the child can trust.
Are incest perpetrators different than other pedophiles (in other words, does the incest loophole make sense)?
If anything incest is a more horrific act. It is betraying and exploiting the most fundamental relationship that a child has. When a young child is developing, the template for all relationships that she forms comes from the relationships with parents—her primary caregivers—the source of the dependent child's safety and sustenance. When a parent sexualizes this—confusing the connections between power, intimacy and sexuality for the child—the child's "template" for future relationships is damaged in ways that are very difficult to live with or to heal.
Incest is a more intrusive, emotionally violent and destructive behavior than a sexual assault from a stranger.
Copyright © 2005 Bruce Perry, M.D., Ph.D. All rights reserved.
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