By Ignacio G Rivera and Aredvi Azad
Content Warning: rape; incest; childhood sexual abuse; sexual violence; police violence.
Communities of color are demanding reduced policing through redistribution of police funds. #DefundThePolice is trending in US news and social media as supporters ask, “what does require police involvement?” Activists and survivors working to end Childhood Sexual Abuse (CSA) are specifically questioning the future of CSA prevention and intervention in a world where police departments are defunded, disbanded, and eventually abolished.
Not unlike most crimes, the “solution” offered to sexual violence and CSA is to call the cops. But victims and survivors of sexual violence do not necessarily desire this response. For people of color, disabled folks, trans people, immigrants, or anyone depending on state assistance for survival, the idea of opening up one’s life to government scrutiny is not only undesirable, but a potential threat.
At the same time, police responses to CSA are hardly satisfactory. On the preventative side, police efforts are concentrated on spotting online predators, which at best remedies only a sliver of the silent pandemic of CSA.
On the retroactive side, law enforcement steps in only after CSA has occurred, been noticed, and reported. At which point, they add more names to the sex offender registry, put more people in jails and prisons, and drag survivors through a gut-wrenching criminal justice process that is re-traumatizing in every step.
With inadequate responses to CSA and little trust in police among people of color and immigrant communities, relying on cops to address an intersectional issue like CSA is questionable, at best. Yet, CSA, together with other forms of sexual violence, has turned into an excuse to justify policing.
Survivors’ hesitation to call the cops stems from a range of reasons: from fear of deportation and loss of income, to desiring agency over the possibility of confrontation with the harm-doer. In a series of interviews collected by Mia Minugus of The Living Bridges initiative, survivors of CSA were well-aware of the harm done both by state-sanctioned solutions (i.e. breaking family connections, re-traumatization, invasion and incarceration), and harmful community responses (i.e. vigilantism, exile, denial, intimidation, shame and blame).
When Aredvi experienced rape by someone within their living community—someone known by their friends—involving the police was not an option for them. As an immigrant of color in the process of obtaining residency, Aredvi not only feared how much more complicated their path to citizenship would become, but also had serious reservations about law enforcement stepping in and handling the case without regard to Aredvi’s (or the harm-doer’s) humanity and boundaries. In Aredvi’s experience, there were major inconsistencies and lack of LGBTQ competency in USCIS (Immigration Office) processes, and opening up about the details of their assault could potentially negatively impact them.
When Ignacio was only 8-years-old, they fell victim to seven years of sexual abuse by their older sister. During these years, Ignacio wanted nothing more but for the manipulation and incest to cease. “I just wanted it to stop,” Ignacio reflects on their experience. “I wanted everyone to know the secret. I needed my family to believe me and protect me.” However, during those years and even after they finally escaped home, calling the police and having their sister go through the criminal justice system was out of the question.
Ignacio grew up in a Black-Boricua household, in a predominantly Black and Brown blue-collar, working class, and poor neighborhood. At the onset of the abuse, their mom had her hands full. She ran the house, dealt with her husband’s drinking, battled chronic illness and primarily managed Ignacio’s older sister’s (and harm-doer) increasing delinquency. She hustled working a side-gig selling things, keeping the welfare system satisfied when they came for random-home-visits.
Among Ignacio’s extended family and those in their Bed-stuy neighborhood, getting stuck in jail cells, court rooms, and prison was not uncommon. It was under these conditions that Ignacio reflects, “I couldn’t have imagined calling the police. I literally lived one block from a precinct. When called, they either showed up too late or didn’t show up at all. No one trusted them. Why should I have called?”
According to a guide for law enforcement response to child abuse published by DOJ, the “ideal” response to CSA involves police arrest and later prosecution of the offender. While involvement of doctors, therapists, and social workers is also recommended, it is unclear to us why policing is the preferred required remedy to the situation.
Despite mandatory reporting laws which require authorities, including teachers, physicians, and other officials to report suspicion of abuse, most cases of CSA are unreported. Considering over 90 percent of CSA offenders are known to victims, mandatory reporting and, in turn, police presence necessitated by the arrest of harm-doers, further discourages victims from reporting offenders that are likely known to them.
There is little incentive to escalate CSA to authorities, both in the case of children, who are often suffering in the hands of the very people who are tasked with protecting them, and their caregivers. As a result, most cases are detected only when behavioral and physical symptoms appear.
For Ignacio, when they were a young person experiencing sexual abuse, they did not have the language to describe their suffering to anyone, including their parents. Ignacio experienced much shame and confusion around what was happening, and cannot imagine properly articulating the situation to adults with the limited tools they had been given.
For Aredvi, their memories of CSA are from a very young age with many missing details. They grew up in a culture where young people are taught to respect those who are older and never contradict them. Aredvi’s harm-doer was an older man living across the street. The neighbor’s inappropriate touch and close contact with Aredvi was not something Aredvi was able to report back to their family at the age of five, or even when they grew older.
Aredvi continued to stay quiet about other experiences of sexual violence throughout their childhood, especially street harrassment. They never felt that any claims about harm would lead to a supportive solution. “I knew my experiences of being groped, molested, and verbally harassed were wrong, but I never wanted to talk about them with anyone,” Aredvi recalls. “I was too ashamed of having been targeted to want to let anyone know what had happened.”
For those who have been relying on law enforcement to address complicated social issues, the very idea of prison and police abolition is outside of the imagination. As a society that promotes policing as the solution to ending violence, we have lost touch with our collective capacity to heal root causes, something law enforcement was never set out to do.
CSA is not an individual problem. CSA happens because systems of inequality weaken our communities, diminish our physical and mental well-being, and reduce our relationships—from the most intimate familial ones to professional connections—into superficial interactions that prioritize surviving Capitalism over strong trusting relationships.
CSA is not a childhood issue. Children do not stop being impacted by the trauma they experienced only because they grew older. Sexual violence against children grows with them into a public health crisis that impacts adults, elders, and future generations.
Forty years later, Ignacio is still grappling with the trauma of the sexual abuse they suffered as a child. They have dedicated their life to understanding the impact of their early childhood trauma and founded The HEAL Project to bring awareness to the issue. They have helped countless survivors of CSA walk on their own path of healing. Yet, Ignacio describes their own journey as an everyday challenge: “I am not a survivor of CSA, I am surviving CSA every day.”
Similarly, Aredvi is aware of the daily burden of dealing with sexual trauma. “It took me many years to allow myself to identify what had happened to me, and how it had been impacting how I live in my body, and that was just the beginning,” Aredvi explains. They expect to get better at managing the impact of sexual violence, but also to deal with the consequences for the rest of their life.
Acknowledging the desperate need for prioritizing survivor well-being, we offer our vision as survivor activists working toward a cultural shift to prevent, end, and heal from CSA. This vision is for us and every survivor who has been let down by the limiting ideas of prevention and justice offered. As Transformative Justice educator and activist Mia Mingus states, “people need to see that the solutions are out there in order to have hope.”
Here are 5 suggestions for responding to CSA with minimal state intervention:
1. Prevention Through Education
Police’s effort to eradicate online grooming may find the guy who repeatedly preys on children on the internet, but they cannot detect the friendly aunt who sometimes sneaks into her nephew’s bedroom. Children need us to do more than rely on law enforcement to protect them from harm.
Prevention work demands examining why violence happens in the first place; a task well outside of the scope of law enforcement. CSA happens at the intersections of our social failures. The systems that keep children in poverty, and subject them to the ongoing horrors of racism, sexism, queer and transphobia, and abelism, are the same systems that curate the conditions in which this violence takes place.
Prevention must be community-driven, intersectional, and cycle through generations; it is a complex process rooted in education, one of the most effective means of preventing sexual violence against children.
When parents and caregivers work through their own shame around sex, and receive accurate information about sexuality, they become a valuable resource for the children in their lives. When children receive information about their bodies, agency, consent, sex, and boundaries, they are empowered to speak up. They are equipped with shame-free language that allows them to seek help from trusting adults if a harm-doer approaches them.
Organizations like Sex Positive Families, Scarleteen, Advocates for Youth, Parenting for Liberation, and The Firecracker Foundation provide numerous resources for raising empowered and aware children.
2. Family and Community Response
Without ongoing police involvement, communities can craft intervention measures that meet their needs. Transformative Justice, defined by Mia Mingus as “a political framework and approach for responding to violence, harm and abuse [that] seeks to respond to violence without creating more violence and/or engaging in harm reduction to lessen the violence,” models an alternative to policing that draws on community resources and connections.
Transformative Justice takes place in communities and families with strong relationships. Intentional community building efforts such as pod mapping, a tool for building resilience in the face of violence, create the foundation for success. Pods are groups of people that are called on to step in when harm and violence takes place for support, accountability, and healing.
Most people have few others in their lives who are well-versed in providing support in times of harm. Pod mapping encourages intentional creation of the space to confront violence before violence has even taken place, as well as stepping in retroactively.
Bystander training, especially when detached from mandatory reporting laws, can also provide a safety net to interrupt violence. In a post-police world, and without fear of state involvement, cultural counselors can step in to assess the situation and come up with a set of interventive steps to reduce harm and rehabilitate families as well.
3. Free Immediate Care
Survivors of CSA deserve to be taken care of immediately and at no cost. Redistribution of funds from police departments to community health centers is a concrete way of supporting survivors of violence. Immediate care for CSA survivors includes medical and psychological examination, as well as providing physically and emotionally safe living conditions.
A new system would also engage community and family members, advocates, educators, and neighborhood businesses in order to construct accessible care for shelter and sustenance as needed. It requires a team of trained professionals that move beyond trauma-informed practices, and adopt a Healing Centered Engagement (HCE) model.
Agency is the very thing from which survivors are robbed. Strategies may differ depending on the age of the survivor, but at any age there are ways to establish a trusting relationship with someone who has suffered trauma. As Dr. Shawn Ginright an education professor at San Francisco State University, puts it:
“A healing centered approach to addressing trauma requires a different question that moves beyond ‘what happened to you’ to ‘what’s right with you’ and views those exposed to trauma as agents in the creation of their own well-being rather than victims of traumatic events.”
4. Free Long-Term Support
Survivors of CSA often find themselves also in need of long-term medical, mental, and financial support. Surviving sexual violence contributes to diminished health and financial outcomes, and communities have a responsibility to provide the basic safety nets required to work through the trauma.
Immediate care centers could serve as a one-stop hub for long-term support, providing resources, training, and assistance to victims and survivors. This is where data collected from accurately reported cases can guide a proper long-term response for harm reduction.
Long-term support must also include accountability for harm-doers. Even though some survivors find suffering of their harm-doer helpful to their healing, we cannot expect harm-doers to rehabilitate and grow when we are focused on punishing them and making them suffer.
In the US, survivors’ mainstream option for accountability is limited to punitive judicial approaches such as adding names to the sex offender registery, GPS monitoring, residency restrictions, and prison sentences. The problem is that these measures, beyond their feel-good effect, are not known to rehabilitate harm-doers, and do not account for the harm caused to the most vulnerable within prisons.
If judicial accountability was effective, we should not be having so many repeat offenders.. Research shows that community approaches to rehabilitation are much more effective than measures like prison. Community accountability can take many forms including initiatives like Circles of Support and Accountability (CoSA), a practice rooted in indigenous Healing Circles, where a group of people sit together in conversation, prayer, and ceremony and commit to healing one another.
While we cannot rehabilitate someone who does not want to change, for those who seek a second chance, an alternative should exist. A more holistic approach is needed to address CSA on a systematic level.
5. Breaking the Cycle of Harm
Transformative Justice, which is an extension of Restorative Justice practices, includes breaking the cycle of violence through “healing, accountability, resilience, and safety for all involved.” As indicated in TransformHarm.org:
“TJ interventions can take different forms, but more often than not, they include (1) supporting survivors around their healing and/or safety and working with the person who has harmed to take accountability for the harm they’ve caused, (2) building community members’ capacities so that they can support the intervention, as well as heal and/or take accountability for any harm they were complicit in, and (3) building skills to prevent violence from occurring, and supporting community members’ skills to interrupt violence while it is happening.”
By conservative estimates, in the US one out of every five people you know is a survivor of CSA. Every time CSA takes place, survivors suffer and deal with life-long consequences. Meanwhile, harm-doers continue to offend until some get caught, go through judicial accountability, and come back to offending again.
There is only so much healing effort we can ask of an individual who is surviving racism, ableism, transphobia, and other forces of injustice on top of being a survivor of CSA. Healing cannot take place in a vacuum. The burden of healing must be carried collectively, so that survivors can be seen and heard for more than the trauma they suffered as children.
In the 2000 documentary, Hollow Water, Bonnie Dickie explores the Ojibway Nation’s intervention to stop and heal CSA and incest. This 48-minute documentary highlights the power of community response and healing circles in stopping harm and rehabilitating offenders.
After parents of five children were found guilty of sexually abusing two of their daughters, the community stepped in to ask the state to let them handle the situation on their own. They formed a group called “Community Holistic Circle Healing (CHCH)” that consisted of people dedicated to the emotional, physical, and spiritual healing of all people involved.
“We don’t believe in jail because [offenders] don’t get no help in jail. The way we see jail system… they go in there and they just get angry and angry. Then, they come back to the community and do the same thing over again, so that cycle just continues. What we’re trying to do is to stop that cycle, to start helping these people. We believe in healing. I believe they can heal.”
— CHCH Member
This is a powerful approach to addressing violence. It acknowledges that healing, as a sacred and cyclical process, cannot take place overnight, in isolation, or without community support. In CHCH, the healing circle is a “a place where openness and sharing are encouraged and everyone is equal.”
Through this process, the offending parents who originally refused to take responsibility for their actions were given the option to work with CHCH, instead of the court system. However, first they had to admit their wrong-doing. At Hollow Water, offenders who did not want to take responsibility did not belong in the community, but harm-doers who wanted to heal received respect and support. They had to attend regular meetings with CHCH for years, were closely monitored by their sponsors, and eventually began building trust back with those they had harmed.
The documentary further unravels the sordid reality that CSA has been rampant in the community for generations. The parents who abused their children were themselves survivors of CSA, and had been raised to think sexually abusing children was part of parenting. It is through open and honest conversation that they eventually learn to take full accountability, and commit to ending the cycle of violence.
Instead of removing them from their community and friends and inflicting further separation trauma, the daughters’ well-being was prioritized by rehoming them in Hollow Water with people they already knew, but away from their parents. The parents and daughters eventually reunite after many years of separation, healing, and reflection. The members of CHCH facilitate this process throughout.
You can watch the documentary for free here, and then view a 20-minute analysis of the documentary by Ignacio Rivera (Taíno Nation) and Koja Adeyoha (Lakota Nation).
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The example set forth by the Ojibway Nation is in direct contrast with experiences of survivors who seek judicial accountability.
In the US legal system, in addition to dealing with strangers while recalling a sensitive and traumatic story, young survivors are left in the hands of adults who have outsized power over them. They have to sit and listen to their parents’ and caregivers’ feelings about what happened to them, and then hear officials talk about and over them.
The process is not designed to make a young survivor feel whole, powerful, or in charge of a very personal process.
In a post-police world, it is the responsibility of communities to provide survivors with options that protect them, and also fulfill the requirements of accountability. We do not live in a post-police world yet, and in this world our imagination can take us only so far. But, for now, the fact that sexual misconduct is the second most reported form of police misconduct, and that half of these cases involve minors, should be reason enough to begin envisioning a world in which law enforcement becomes the last stop on the CSA prevention and intervention train.
For marginalized communities, resolving conflict and crime, including sexual violence, without state intervention is nothing new. We have much to learn about mitigating harm from those who have already abandoned law enforcement.
As we defund the police and invest the money in communities, we invite survivors and advocates to join us in expanding our collective vision for new possibilities in a world without sexual violence against children.
Ignacio G Hutía Xeiti Rivera, M.A., is a cultural sociologist with expertise in sexual trauma, healing, and liberation for marginalized people. They are an internationally known gender non-conforming speaker, trainer, and consultant. Ignacio uses they/them/their is the Founder and Executive Director at The HEAL Project.
Aredvi Azad is a sex and relationship educator and certified coach, focusing on the impact of childhood sexual and emotional trauma in adult relationships. They are a queer and genderfluid Irani-American immigrant writing and producing educational material for nearly a decade. Aredvi uses pronouns they/them/theirs and is the Director of Education and Programs at The HEAL Project.
