Be My Bodyguard: Child Sex Abuse at Home
Here are three edgy tweets on child sexual abuse and parents. Some of these are red pilled and hostile - but let's not allow the phrasing to throw us off what might be an interesting idea.
(This account has been suspended so I can't link to the original tweet.)
Some more on this: the claim is straight-up wrong. We know that sexual abuse is not restricted to just dads and stepdads, any person in a child's life might abuse them - teachers, coaches, priests, babysitters, other relatives, strangers at the bus stop, etc. Suggesting that there is a direct line between a woman leaving the biological father of her child and a complete stranger abusing that child seems dumb. (But is it dumb? In Journey Into Darkness, John E. Douglas mentions that some predators traget children from single-parent homes because they're more likely to be vulnerable. But that's not the point Covfefe Anon is trying to argue so no points for that. I'll loop back around to this later when we discuss fatherlessness.)
Looking specifically at the dad/stepdad sub-set of abusers, it may be true that stepdads are more apt to be abuse children in their care. In the thread on Twitter, Covfefe Anon acknowledges that the data above is actually for physical abuse rather than sexual abuse (which is presumably categorised separately). So Covfefe Anon backs up their point with the a screenshot from this PDF (see the last paragraph on page 9).
The relevant stats from the PDF are (paraphrasing):
In a survey of 930 San Francisco women, of those with a stepfather as a primary father figure before the age of 14, 17% had been abused by their stepfather(s). Only 2% of women who had been raised by their biological father reported being sexually abused by their father. Here's the full article (I haven't read it)
9,000 Finnish 15 year olds were asked to complete a questionnaire. Of those who completed the survey, 3.7% of girls who lived with a stepfather (or equivalent) reported that he had sexually abused them compared to 0.2% of girls living with their biological father. Here's the full article (I haven't read it)
What links these tweets is a commentary about the decay of the traditional family unit and how this endagers children, through exposing children to strange men in the home and through raising children without a father. I'm also detecting a thread of women being blamed for child sex abuse in the home - even when they aren't the perpetrator. So, I want to look at:
Part 1: Sins of the father: Is it true that biological fathers are less likely to sexually abuse their children than stepfathers? Are stepparents really the most dangerous people in a child's life compared to strangers, creepy uncles, etc.?
Part 2: Is it dangerous to not live with dad? Why is living in a single parent household a risk factor for child sex abuse?
And to conclude: Are there risks you can control?
I grew up with loving, generous, supportive stepparents who have been a super positive influence in my life. People I know with stepparents (e.g. my partner) have always reported similar relationships
For succinctness, I use the term stepparent/stepdad as a catch-all but know that this also includes parents' partners like boyfriends and girlfriends, etc. These distinctions seem blurry and variable in most of the articles I've looked at - for example, it's not clear if Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) stats referring to stepfathers also include boyfriends and unmarried partners
As I've worked on this, I'm realising there's some haziness around adopted kids. They likely aren't living with their biological father but also aren't necessarily living with a stepparent. I can't be bothered investigating this and seeing if the stats differ but wanted to acknowledge this gap in the post
I'm focusing on the stepdad scenario for child sexual abuse because it is the most common (because the majority of child sexual abuse is committed by men)
A caveat with everything I'm discussing: child sexual abuse is likely to be underreported. Most of the data in Part 1 is self-reported abuse from victims completing surveys, but the data may still be skewed or incomplete
I recently had a baby out of wedlock so I have skin in the game
Part 1: Sins of the father
I've spent around an hour surfing Google Scholar for articles with concrete numbers comparing rates of biological and step father child sexual abuse and have not been able to find much.
In terms of Australian data, the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) has some detailed data on who abuses children in Australia (this article was published in 2014 and seems to rely on data from roughly 2005 - 2009). The AIFS cites the following:
"[T]he majority of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by males"
"[R]esearch suggests that a far greater number of child sexual abuse offences are perpetrated by adults who are not in a caregiver role"
"Findings from the ABS Personal Safety Survey (2005) indicated that for participants who had experienced sexual abuse before the age of 15, only 13.5% identified that the abuse came from their father/stepfather, 30.2% was perpetrated by other male relative, 16.9% by family friend, 15.6% by acquaintance/neighbour, and 15.3% by other known person (ABS, 2005)"
The ABS puts the total number of Australians who have experienced child sexual abuse at 1,294,000. This is from 2005 when the population was 20.39 million - so the ABS is saying roughly 6% of the population. This seems low compared to a lot of other stats online. For example, this meta-analysis puts the numbers at 7.9% of men and 19.7% of women suffering some form of sexual abuse prior to the age of eighteen. Even if the ABS numbers are low, I hope the characteristics are roughly correct.
Here's the data from the ABS Personal Safety Survey (2005) cited by the AIFS (see page 42 if my screenshot is hard to read):
The relevant row is the Father/Step Father row under the Relationship to perpetrator heading. An issue with most data I've found on this subject is that boyfriends and partners often aren't clearly categorised in the data - for example, would the Father/step father row also include boyfriends and partners?
Annoyingly, the ABS has grouped biological fathers and stepfathers in a single category. Based on the two studies brought to us by Covfefe Anon above, we might expect stepfathers to make up the dominant part of those numbers. Still, I'd like to deduce what proportion of the 13.5% figure for fathers (from the table above) is attributable to stepdads so I'm going to do some horribly hacky extrapolation based on this study (the Finnish one we looked at earlier in relation to Covfefe Anon's tweet and which has very conservative numbers) and the numbers in the table above. I'll include my calculations and assumptions in case I get anything wrong:
Looking at the data for fathers in the table above, the ABS is estimating that 175,100 Australians have experienced child sexual abuse at the hands of a father fugure - either their biological father or a stepfather
This is from 2005 when the population was 20.39 million - so the ABS is saying rougly 0.8% of Australians had been sexually abused by a father figure - either their biological father or a stepfather
I'm going to use this study based on the Finnish schoolgirl survey to segment out abuse by father vs stepfather. The study found 0.5% of girls had reported any sexual contact with a father or stepfather. That's slighty lower than the ABS number of 0.8% but some of that difference would be explained by the inclusion of boys in the ABS figure
Based on the Finnish study, 0.2% of girls who lived with their father reported that he had sexually abused them. Let's bump that to 0.3% to account for abuse of boys by biological fathers
So maybe 0.3% of the 20.39 million Australians in 2005 had been sexually abused by their biological father figure? That would land us at around 61,170 people. So 61,170 out of the 175,100 total
We could then infer that the remaining 113,930 cases from 175,100 total were perpetrated by a stepfather
So I think our indicative percentages are as follows:
(As with the ABS data, the percentages do not sum perfectly to 100 as more than one perpetrator may have been involved in the abuse.)
Australian census data from 2011 indicates that "71% of children lived with both natural parents, 4% were in step-families, and 5% were in blended families." (If you want ths ABS' definitions for these family types, refer to page 3 in this doc.) So roughly 29% of children live in some form of blended, step, or single parent household meaning they may have non-biological father figures around. Given that only 29% of Australian children live in a home where they may be exposed to stepparents, that would suggest that stepfathers are a lot more likely to sexually abuse children in their care than biological fathers. They make up, at most, one third of dads but commit twice as much sexual abuse.
That said, the following people still committed more child sexual abuse than biological fathers or stepfathers:
Other male relatives (uncle, sibling, grandfather, etc.) - in 30.2% of cases
Family friends - in 16.3% of cases
Acquaintences/neighbours - in 15.6% of cases
Other known persons - in 15.3% of cases
As I mentioned earlier, it's not clear to me where unmarried partners and boyfriends would be classified by the ABS - possibly under Other Known Persons? As a point of comparison, I've found some US data on child sex abuse in the The 2010 US Fourth National Incidence Study of Abuse and Neglect (NIS-4) that segments biological parents from non-biological parents. The NIS-4 found (see page 195):
Only small percentages of children were maltreated by an out-of-home biological parent (3.3%), by out-of-home nonbiological parent (0.1%), or by their parentâs boyfriend or girlfriend (2.4%).
The percentages above are for all forms of neglect and abuse (physical, emotional, etc.). This table (from page 197) provides more specific detail on sexual abuse:
The percentages and proportions here differ pretty significantly from the ABS data. Biological parents have now overtaken stepparents as abusers. The percentage of abuse committed by nonbiological parents and partners has also increased - this may be higher than the ABS numbers if the ABS categorised boyfriends/partners under Other Known Persons or Acquaintances, etc.
(Just to note, the total of maltreated children figure in the NIS-4 may look low compared to the ABS numbers. This is because the NIS-4 is looking at instances of abuse within the survey period of 2005 - 2006 whereas the ABS collected data on any historical abuse experienced in a person's lifetime.)
I don't know what to make of these differences - is one set of statistics way off? Are dads in America just more sexually abusive for some reason? Out of curiosity, I looked up child sex abuse stats for some other countries.
In England and Wales, 7% of surveyed victims reported being subject to sexual assault by rape or penetration by their father vs 8% by a stepfather
In New Zealand (see page 5), 9% of surveyed victims reported being sexually abused by their father vs 6% by a stepparent
In these studies the rates of father vs stepfather abuse are similar but remember that there are roughly three times as many biological dads as there are stepparents (assuming roughly one third of households have stepparents in the mix) so stepdads to appear to be more dangerous to a child than its biological father. Both of these studies had the same old issue of figures related to boyfriends/partners not being clearly labelled, so these numbers might move a bit depending on where boyfriends are categorised.
There is no agreement on the real prevalence of child sexual abuse. Some studies have very high estimates - e.g. that 70% of US women were sexually abused as kids, whereas others place this number at closer to 10%. Given the level of uncertainty around what proportion of people have been abused, it's not surprising that the data on perpetrators is sketchy. Based on my research above, it does seem that stepdads are more likely to sexually abuse children in their care than biological fathers. But stepdads still appear to abuse kids at a lesser rate than opportunistic strangers or other men in their lives - even other relatives.
Part 2: Is it dangerous to not live with dad?
Everything I've read indicates that living in a single parent household is a risk factor for child sexual abuse (sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). As I mentioned earlier, Covfefe Anon's tweet at the top was not specifically about this, but they may have been inadvertently correct that a mother leaving her partner to live alone does put a child at increased risk of abuse. But why is that?
Looking through those sources above (this one is especially relevant to my point), you'll notice other risk factors related to the family home include poverty, parents doing drugs or struggling with mental illness, low education levels, and domestic violence. It seems that in general anything that might make a family home suboptimal is a risk factor - a broken home or non-nuclear family is just one way in which a family home could be shitty. It's not the only risk factor and it's not necessarily the most significant. Although, when you look at the other risk factors, it is certainly the most socially accceptable.
The out of wedlock birth rate is on the rise in Australia, increasing from roughly 10% in 1970 to 35% in 2017.
(Noting that despite the hysteria, a child born out of wedlock won't necessarily be raised without a father figure.)
The divorce rate in Australia has actually dropped slightly since 2000 but this might just be a consequence of the declining marriage rate. In any case, the structure of Australian families is changing. So if single family or blended family homes were meaningfully increasing the risk of child sex abuse, would we expect to see an increase in child sex abuse since the 1970s (when the out of wedlock birth rate began to jump)? Or is this abuse that would have occurred regardless now just happening in a different setting?
Trying to determine if child sex abuse has increased is confounded by a couple of things:
There isn't good data dating back to the 1970s (or at least, nothing I could find)
Child sex abuse is reported a lot more than it used to be, but it's difficult to say whether this is attributable to an increase in reporting abuse as compared to an actual increase in the prevalence of abuse. For example, this Victorian sentencing data for 2010 - 2019 (see PDF page 4) doesn't appear to show an increase in child sex offences over that period.
People who amplify the broken home sex abuse risk factor tend to be conservative commentators bemoaning the dissolution of the nuclear family. (For example, this line of argument seems to have been of particular interest to Bettina Arndt who wrote about it for The Sydney Morning Herald and was involved with this 'issue analysis' from the think tank Centre for Independent Studies.) This forms part of a larger discourse about the tearing of the social fabric related to fatherlessness. Interestingly, there does seem to be a clustering of child sex abuse risk factors and risks associated with fatherlessness. According to Fathers dot com, "children from fatherless homes are more likely to be poor, become involved in drug and alcohol abuse, drop out of school, and suffer from health and emotional problems." So poverty, mental health, substance abuse, and non-traditional family structure are all correlated - and these all also happen to be risk factors for child sex abuse.
The ultimate risk factor for child sexual abuse seems to be weak family or community structures to protect children from predation. Fatherlessness is a symptom of this, along with parental drug use, domestic violence, and mental health issues. So the commentators advocating for a return to good old fashioned family values may have a point about how to protect children in your home. But! Reducing risk factors doesn't address the root problem of rapist pedophiles in society. If you create a safe, traditional home for your kids and thwart a pedophile who might otherwise have abused your children in your home, I believe that pedophile will just find a different kid or different setting to exploit. I don't believe that fixing the issue of fatherlessness reduces the base rate of pedophiles.
And to conclude: Are there risks you can control?
Even if you do everything right, your kid might still be abused. There may also be risk factors as a parent that you can't control - for example, being poor. But based on the research I've done for this post, here's some some practical steps that should be within your control:
Take the risk of child sex abuse seriously. It is more common than you may realise so don't be complacent. The data is fuzzy but likely somewhere between 10 - 25% of kids are sexually abused. (This number seems high and it is scary - but maybe also comforting in a way. If child sex abuse is this common, it does suggest that abused children are generally able to recover and live relatively normal lives depending on the nature of the abuse, etc.)
The vast majority of child sex abuse is carried out by men - so be cautious of leaving your child alone with men or male adolescents. For example, hire female nannies and carers; if you're leaving your kid with friends or family, ensure a woman will be present the entire time
Girls are two to three times more likely to be abused than boys so be extra careful with female children
The majority of abuse (more than 90%) occurs in children aged 5 years and older (see page 42 in PDF). Nearly 50% occurred in children aged 9 - 14 years. From a young age, children have enough autonomy to speak and express preferences. Empower your child so they know what is and isn't okay in terms of contact and affection. Teach them to trust you so they tell you when something doesn't seem right and to yell for help when they need to
John Douglas (Mr. Mindhunter) included advice in his book Journey Into Darkness on child safety and how to prevent and detect abuse - I've roughly copied some of this advice below:
What you can do to prevent child abuse
Know where your children are at all times. Be familiar with their friends and daily activities.
Be sensitive to changes in your children's behaviour
Be alert to a teenager or adult who is paying an unusual amount of attention to your children
Teach your children to trust their own feelings and assure them that they ave the right to say NO to what they sense is wrong
Listen carefully to your children's fears, and be supportive in all your discussions with them
Teach your children that no one should approach them or touch tem in a way that makes them feel uncomforable. If someone does, they should tell your immediately
Basic rules of safety for children
As soon as your children can articulate a sentence, they can begin the process of learning how to protect themselves against exploitation. Children should be taught:
If your are in a public place and get separated from your parents, go to a checkout counter or the security office and quickly tell the person in charge that you have lost your parents and need help finding them
You should not get in a car or go anywhere with someone unless your parents have told you that it is okay
Grown-ups and other older people who need help should not be asking children for help; they should be asking older people. No one should be asking you for directions
If someone tries to take you somewhere, quickly get away from them and yell "This person is not my parent! They are trying to take me away!"
If someone follows you on foot or in a car, stay away from them.
If someone speaks to you from a car, you don't need to go near the car to talk to the people inside
You should try to use the buddy system and never go places alone
