Sexualised behaviour in fostered and adopted children is very common but it is an incredibly difficult subject for adults to think and talk about openly. As a result we often avoid it or deal with it in a relatively superficial, behavioural manner rather than in a connected, emotional one. This is entirely understandable! The stress that comes with looking after a child displaying sexualised behaviour is absolutely enormous and advice is often contradictory.
As well as the incredible stress there are also psychological and societal reasons that we avoid or react in an emotionally distanced behavioural way.
- It is very uncomfortable to think about the sexuality of children and teenagers even when we’re confronted with it.
- When children direct their sexual attention towards adults and other children there is a tremendous sense of risk and responsibility on carers.
- The need to juggle the simultaneous identities of a child as both victim and perpetrator is complex and challenging.
- This is all in addition to attempting to understand what typical sexual development and behaviour in children and teenagers is!
The sexualised behaviour commonly seen in traumatised children can be broadly grouped into three categories. Some children display sexualised behaviour towards adults, some towards other children and some display sexualised behaviour alone but are indiscriminate about who sees them.
Typical Strategies
It is common for adults to react to the sexualised behaviour of children with reward-punishment thinking. Responding empathically to such behaviour requires us to accept, and think in great detail about, the sexual thoughts and feelings of children. It may also necessitate a thought about the origin of such behaviour e.g. sexual abuse, domestic violence, exposure to sexually explicit materials and challenges the comforting idea that “good” and “bad” can be neatly separated and defined. I.e. it demonstrates that sexual vulnerability and predatory sexual behaviour can exist simultaneously in the same person. In addition, accepting the potential vulnerability and innocence of someone that could do something so abhorrent can also cause us shame; “how can I love and accept someone who could sexually assault a child? What does that say about me?”
There are two unconsciously enticing options that enable us to by-pass this internal conflict. Firstly to avoid or minimise the sexualised behaviour or, secondly, to allow or create emotional distance from the child.
In practical terms you may well try, first of all, to try to explain to your child why they should not engage in such behaviour and then reprimand them when they do it again. This depends upon their being a clear, black and white understanding of perpetrator and victim, this is rarely available. There may be factors of coercion, acquiescence and ambivalence to consider.
Ultimately, many children who display sexualised behaviour suffer devastating punishments for their behaviour i.e. they are moved from their placements, communities, schools and/or their sibling(s). These things are rarely done as an overt punishment, but due to the pervasive nature of reward-punishment thinking they are frequently considered to be the best options. In some cases, of course, the very difficult decision has to be made to compromise the attachment needs of one child in order to ensure the safety of another and so a child may move placement.
Another common, and very understandable, strategy is to reduce the levels of intimacy in the caregiving and sibling relationships. This enables the risk to another child to be managed and can reduce the risk that a child will make a false allegation against their carer.
However, with developmentally traumatised children, all of these consequences will increase the levels of shame, attachment-seeking behaviours and need for the use of hard-wired survival strategies, they may in fact increase the sexualised behaviour and so should be avoided if at all possible.
Understanding Sexualised Behaviour
There are several types of early experience that can drive a child’s need to present in a sexualised manner. It is tempting to assume that all children who display sexually inappropriate behaviour have been sexually abused in their past. Whilst this is often proved to be the case, and indeed may still be the case even when sexual abuse is not disclosed, there are other experiences that can lead to sexualised behaviour.
n order to properly understand what drives the sexualised behaviour we must understand it in its nuanced detail and what gains and/or irresistible impulses are at work. It is for this reason that, when we see labels of “Sexualised Behaviour”, “Sexually Inappropriate Behaviour”, “Masturbation” we need to find a way to overcome our visceral disgust, confront the issue and be willing to ask awkward, uncomfortable questions of relevant adults (and sometimes, with caution, children themselves) about the details of who, why, where, how and, exactly, what.
Emotional Regulation
Children who have not experienced having their emotions regulated in babyhood (see PAFCA’s emotional regulation article) will have often developed solo strategies that help to regulate their mood. Most people can remember the TV images of the children placed in Romanian orphanages in the early nineteen nineties. In the absence of a responsive adult many of them used one of the few strategies available to them for regulating themselves, rocking. This rhythmical activity, in the absence of anything else, creates a physiological reaction that will go some way to regulating a child when they need it.
“Masturbation” is one such way that some children can break through the numbness of their existence. It is not, necessarily, sexual but it is, necessarily, intensely sensory and potentially soothing.
Effects of Experience on Brain and Biology
The experience dependent nature of the pre-frontal cortex of their brains means that children who have experienced developmental trauma are likely to have underdeveloped executive functions. One such executive function is the ability to inhibit impulses. When sexualised children have the urge to seek comfort, self-regulate or simply engage with another person, as any of us might, these children may impulsively, look to sexual activity to fulfil those needs. Such children are unlikely, to be able to inhibit their impulse to act on such imperative relational needs.
If a child’s sexualised behaviour is due to difficulties with impulsivity then reward-punishment thinking is unlikely to yield positive results
Shame
It is tempting to imagine that if we communicate to our children that their sexualised behaviour is unacceptable and make them a little ashamed of it then they are bound to be deterred from doing it again. Indeed this is the tactic that is most commonly applied when dealing with many challenging behaviours of children and its use makes complete sense within the framework of reward-punishment thinking.
The problem with the application of shame is that developmentally traumatised children are very poor at handling it and quickly become defensive and protect their behaviours by hiding them. In addition, sexualised behaviour may enable children to meet their needs for intimacy and so facilitate an important, fundamental drive that a developmentally traumatised child cannot afford to abandon.
When, inherently shaming, reward-punishment strategies are employed to deter developmentally traumatised children from displaying sexualised behaviour the likely consequence will be that the behaviour will be concealed but not stopped. This is almost certainly the case when these strategies are used without replacing them with alternatives that address the need that has driven the behaviour.
Reducing intimacy, via limiting physical touch and/or separating siblings, may at first glance, seem like an entirely sensible strategy when dealing with a child who displays sexualised behaviour. It certainly meets the short-term goals of reducing the opportunities for sexualised behaviour. However, in children that have already been starved of appropriate intimacy, this strategy is likely to increase their drive to seek out the intimacy and add in the necessity for deception, thus making it much harder to manage the risk.
Fundamentally, we need to communicate to children, and allow them to internalise the belief, that these behaviours are, in fact, understandable. That the needs which drive the sexualised behaviours (e.g. loneliness, emotional regulation, intimacy) can be accommodated, understood and actually welcomed. If we can achieve this then we do stand a chance of preventing the child’s need to sustain their sexualised behaviour into adulthood.