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February 16, 2005
Caring for Caregivers, a Long Term Commitment
Journey Often Bittersweet When Raising Sexually Abused Kids
by Kevin Gillick
When Foster parents Jim and Cathy (not their real names) agreed to provide a home for children who had been sexually abused, they understood the task could be daunting. They had special skills after raising their own daughter who had been gravely injured in an automobile accident as young girl. After all, doctors had said the child would not live past the age of ten and yet she was an adult living as full a life as could be expected despite her profound physical and psychological injuries. They had beaten the odds with love, patience and hundreds of hours of special training.
In 1998, when state authorities asked them to provide a home to a boy and a girl who had been sexually abused, they agreed. The boy was eleven and had been assaulted by older males in a group home. The girl was thirteen and had been molested by her own parents before the age of five. Within a year Jim and Cathy needed help.
Jim had been awakened one night to find the boy in the bedroom of another foster child - an eight year-old. The eleven year-old seemed to be trying to remove the pajama top of the younger boy. They consulted a child psychologist who agreed to work with the youth. He also told them about a new support group for parents of sexually abused children called; “Parenting the Victimized Child”.
“We had been offering a support group for adults who had been sexually abused as children.” says Melinda Poole, Facilitator of “Victims No More”. “We began to get calls from people who were concerned about how to help children in their own families who had been abused. They were parents, grandparents and other caregivers such as foster parents. In response to this need, we developed the second group using the same collaborative arrangement with PREVENT! of Brevard and Protect Our Children.”
Poole went to work immediately. They devised a new sleeping arrangement for the family whereby the boy could not access the other children without awakening Jim and Cathy. She worked closely with the individual counselor to arrest the boy’s behavior and she helped the foster parents understand what his behavior meant.
“He was becoming the sexual bully...”, Poole explained, “reenacting what had been done to him by older boys in the group home.” She enlisted the aid of other experts who further evaluated the child. The consensus seemed to indicate that the boy needed inpatient treatment. The hunt for an appropriate facility was on.
During this time another bombshell exploded. The female foster child, who was now fourteen, had begun to exhibit bizarre behaviors. “ She was defecating in wastepaper baskets and had developed a compulsion to stuff objects in the bathroom bowl and flush it over and over” said Poole.
The same kind of regime was used: individual counseling for the child and weekly group sessions with the foster parents, giving them information and emotional support and devising strategies to overcome the behaviors. The child had not only been sexually abused by her birth parents, but had been forced to watch her siblings, some as young as three, being raped.
The boy’s behavior continued to deteriorate. The child told Jim one day, that he wanted to do to other boys, what had been done to him.
There were only two facilities in the country capable of treating the boy and both were expensive. The treatment team which had been assembled to help the family, began a desperate search to find the necessary funds.
Jim literally took the child, now thirteen, under his wing, hoping that enough patience and love would do the trick. He sensed, as well, that they might be losing the battle. Months passed, and the search for money to pay for the child’s treatment proved fruitless. Jim and Cathy had to face the possibility that the boy would have to be given back to the state, to live in the group homes where he was first abused.
“They truly loved the child, but he had unfinished emotional business. When a child acts out like this he often seeking to relive the trauma in order to be free of it” the counseler explained, “ It’s a natural reaction to severe abuse.”
But the “acting out” behavior was placing the other children at risk, and the boy was removed from their home.
“We grieved together”, says Melinda Poole. “It was a process similar to that which is experienced with the death of a child. The foster father was particularly devastated.”
Poole continued her work with Jim and Cathy in order to help the abused girl. Her extensive background in dealing with addictive behavior seemed to help in working with the parents of the compulsive child. In fact it was her experience in treating addictive behavior that led to her to work with victims of child sex abuse; “We were finding that many people who were addicted to substances, or behaviors or even other people, had in fact been sexually abused as children. Recovery is, for these people, all part of the same process.“
Group sessions went on for two more years. Each new cluster of behaviors was addressed as soon as they appeared, therapist and client knowing full well that the child would have to leave, should her behaviors become threatening to the other children.
The teamwork, the strategising and the occasional crying paid off. The teen began to respond, and eventually the demons disappeared. She grew to adulthood as Jim and Cathy’s beloved foster child. Last month she completed her basic training in Texas and is serving her country in the armed forces.
Posted by uspoc at February 16, 2005 10:22 PM