Johannesburg - Liezel* tried for years to forget about what happened to her when she was 6 years old.
But her eating disorders, reckless sexual behaviour and alcoholism in her twenties needed at some point to be addressed.
It was after she read Andre Brink’s The Other Side of Silence that she confronted what had happened to her.
The book contains a scene where a woman abuses another woman. It was the first time she had read anything that resembled what she had been through as a child when the woman caring for her abused her.
“I remember being bathed by my nanny when I was 6. During the bath, she told me to open my legs because she wanted to clean my vagina. She started to rub my labia. I remember knowing this was wrong, but then thinking she is just bathing me and that’s how you bath. It happened twice, then I started refusing. I closed my legs and she left me alone.”
Liezel said she didn’t want to bath after that, but her parents never thought anything was wrong.
“My mom was fairly unstable and I thought telling her would make things worse,” Liezel said.
It was only when she started going for therapy as an adult that Liezel was able to tell her parents what had happened.
“I thought maybe my mom would understand because she told me she had been abused by her cousin when she was a child. But she didn’t believe me. She told me I had a habit of making up stories.”
She also told her father, who had been the parent she was close to. He didn’t believe her either. He told her the nanny wasn’t a lesbian, she was married. In his mind, that meant it could not have happened.
“When I was older, I started trying to justify what had happened. We were fairly affluent and I thought maybe she was a black woman who had been abused by apartheid and that explained her behaviour. But look at the harm she did to me.”
Liezel could not ignore the eating disorders. She would throw up after most meals, she drank a lot and had unprotected, reckless sex.
She got the HPV virus.
“I only stopped throwing up my food when I fell pregnant,” she said.
It was in therapy that she looked more deeply into what the sexual abuse of children entailed. It ranges from sexual penetration to molestation.
She also discovered that the denial that a woman could do this was strong, not just with her parents but in society.
“People believe mothers and mother figures are caring and nurturing. Because of that I’ve tried my whole life to understand why this happened. I’ve learnt that it seems to happen in a caring environment. During bathtime or when putting cream on the body,” Liezel said.
“It’s an incredibly complex mix of emotions. We rely on our mothers or carers that replace our mothers, so we suppress it.”
What has made the situation worse is that the nanny still lives with her parents and she is still a part of her life.
“I have never been able to confront her about it,” she said.
The Independent newspaper in England highlighted last year that one in 10 calls to Childline reporting sexual abuse over that year were from children who had been harmed by women.
Research from 2005 found up to 5 percent of all sexual offences committed against children were by women, but it is believed the true proportion is much higher.
The English organisation said women were more able to hide abuse because society found it harder to accept that they were capable of it.
Women also spend more time alone caring for children.
Childline said there needed to be a better understanding of female sexual abuse for there to be appropriate treatment programmes.
Dr Shaheda Omar, director of the Teddy Bear Clinic, said it was unfair to see abuse as gender specific.
“There are plenty of female abusers, but they are more difficult to identify because they are seen as carers,” she said.
She said one thing she had noticed though was the increase in reports of abuse from mothers who had found nannies and women in crèches were abusing children.
This ranges from physical abuse, giving children Calpol to make them sleepy, children being put on the breast when this is not what the mother wants, to the masturbation of children by nannies.
“People are so relaxed to leave their children with nannies, believing they have an excellent caregiver. But abusers do gravitate to settings where they can have easy access to children and with smaller children, it’s easier to get away with it,” Omar said.
She said there was one case where the nanny was putting an older child, who was long past breastfeeding age, on her breast.
For the child it became a soothing mechanism and the mother could not understand why at night her daughter was trying to suck her breasts.
Omar said parents needed to be cognisant of abuse by women who were nannies and teachers and become proactive.
She recommends that:
* Cameras be placed in homes and crèches for parents to watch what is going on.
* When hiring a carer for your child, you go to the police station and ask them to screen your employee to see if they are on the child protection register for having committed offences against children or if they have any other criminal offences.
* Not her real name.
Internet can be proactive tool against abuse
One area where there has been criminal crackdowns on the abuse of children is the possession and distribution of child sexual abuse images.
Last month, four South Africans were arrested, with the help of the FBI and Belgian police, for being involved in an international child porn ring.
The crackdown started when a 37-year-old man from Plettenberg Bay was arrested when it was discovered he was distributing child porn to Belgium. A couple in Port Elizabeth were nabbed with hard drives, cameras and USBs that contained child porn, while a Grahamstown man, who was said to be the brains behind an international syndicate, was also arrested.
But arrests of perpetrators could be higher, according to Lauren Wain, the business development manager at African Risk Mitigation, if internet service providers (ISPs) were allowed to be proactive, rather than reactive, in the war against child sexual abuse.
“Unfortunately, the ISPs are caught between a rock and a hard place. While they might want to assist law enforcement, the structure of the law has placed them in a predicament,” Wain says.
ISPs fall under the jurisdiction of both the Film and Publications Board(FPB) regulations and the Regulation of Interception of Communications Act (RICA).
While clause 27A of the FPB regulations states that “Every internet service provider shall take all reasonable steps to prevent the use of their services for the hosting or distribution of child pornography”, RICA statesthat “Any person who intentionally intercepts or attempts to intercept, or authorises or procures any other person to intercept or attempt to intercept, at any place in the Republic, any communication in the course of its occurrence or transmission, is guilty of an offence.”
“This really offers a conundrum to ISPs,”says Wain. “It is the ISPs’ responsibility to prevent the spread of these images, and yet RICA prohibits them from having a monitoring tool that can monitor or intercept traffic.
“How many cases in the past two years could have been prevented if ISPs were allowed to actively get involved in the fight against child sexual abuse?”
An international company called Netclean, which partners with law enforcement agencies around the world, is one solution.
Products from the company have resulted in the successful arrest and prosecution of hundreds of offenders around the world, including South Africa.
The company’s products find new illegal material, identifies victims, blocks material which is then shared with police, and blocks URLs containing child sexual abuse content.
Healthy adults, happy children
April is National Child Protection Month and this year, with large increases in the cost of living about to be implemented, stress on families may make children’s lives more difficult.
Dr Shaheda Omar, director of the Teddy Bear Clinic, which provides holistic child protection services, said she believed awareness must not just focus on children, but also on the health of adults who care for children.
“Often we place the emphasis on the child. We teach them they have to say no, that they need to speak out and that they must run away from bad situations.
“What we also need to do, however, is focus on adults. Because healthy adults will ultimately lead to happy and well children,” Omar said.
Omar said more investment by the government needed to be put on parenting programmes and that departments like social development and education should synergise their efforts because fighting the scourge of child abuse needed systemic intervention.
“There’s always a big ra-ra when it’s Child Protection Week, but then what?” Omar asked.
She said on the one hand things were getting better because there were more platforms being created for children to access support, but on the other hand crime and unemployment were on the increase which led to anger, boredom and domestic violence and ultimately violations against children.
“I listened to the radio this past week and there was news about the fuel hike, electricity and water hikes.
“In two weeks this will lead to the price of food increasing. I thought how are the poor and unemployed going to cope with this?
“It leads to crime increasing and pressures on the family get worse.”
Omar said the incidence of domestic violence in South Africa was one of the highest in the world and it was these risk factors which made the situation worse.
The Star