DEAF PEOPLE & THE CRIME OF SEXUAL ABUSE: September 30, 2009

When I began my ministry as a Catholic priest in 1971, I knew little of sexual abuse, and certainly nothing about its impact on the lives on adult survivors. My father had been a Chicago Police officer for 27 years, and had been 2^nd in command of the Police Youth Division. He had told me a few stories from his work, but they hardly seemed relevant to the world of ministry I was entering.

As a young priest in a hearing parish, I rarely encountered anyone coming to me to tell me they had been sexually abused. The reasons, of course, are obvious. Most child victims of sexual abuse either do not understand they are being abused or are too terrified to disclose this. Most adult survivors of sexual abuse are either too traumatized by their experience, have developed coping mechanisms (often disassociation) that deny their experience even as it destroys them psychologically, or simply are unwilling to trust their “story” with anyone. Most of the people from my first parish assignment who had been sexual abuse victims did not tell me about their experiences till years after I left that parish.

In 1977, John Cardinal Cody appointed me to be the priest working with deaf people in the Archdiocese of Chicago. Despite the fact that I had had deaf grandparents, my knowledge of sign-language and of the deaf “world” was severely limited. In my first five years of working with the deaf community, only one deaf person revealed to me that she had been a victim of sexual abuse by her father and grandfather (both hearing). Again, a number of deaf people did not know me well enough to entrust their stories to me or did not feel my communication skills were appropriate to what they had to tell me. (As I also came to learn, their own experiences with hearing priests in this matter were troubling and confusing.)

In the early 1980’s, deaf adults began coming to me for counseling. Often, the issues involved relationships, more specifically, why they were having so much trouble developing or maintaining any significant levels of intimacy, whether in friendship or marriage. As I began to spend time with them, these people began to reveal stories of their past that were shocking and appalling to me (in many cases, almost beyond belief).

A number of deaf adults revealed to me that they had been victims of sexual abuse as children and teenagers. The situations were almost always, though not exclusively, cases of a hearing person sexually abusing a deaf young person:
1) Many cases involved hearing relatives – parents, grandparents, uncle/aunts, cousins, older siblings – engaging in inappropriate and criminal sexual activity with these deaf children.

2) Other cases involved hearing teachers, dorm supervisors, and coaches at deaf institutional schools committing criminal acts of sexual abuse.(There were deaf adults employed by these schools who also took part in these actions. There were also older deaf students who took advantage of the younger students in these schools.)

More troubling, there were a number of Catholic priests who were involved with Catholic institutional schools for the deaf, or were “chaplains” to deaf communities, who committed numerous acts of sexual abuse with deaf children and teens, often explaining this as “deaf sex education”. There are also a number of accounts of physical abuse in these schools.

3) Later, I encountered hearing children of deaf parents who told me how they also had been victims of sexual abuse either by their deaf parents OR by the deaf friends of the parents. In one case, the priest for the deaf community also molested them.

As I began in the mid-1980’s to try to deal with what I was learning, I discovered that:

a) there was little information in the professional world about the abuse of children with disabilities;

b) there was a significant level of resistance, even by so-called professionals in the field, to accept that children with disabilities could be victims of sexual abuse;

c) there was, as we know now, great institutional resistance by many public bodies, including the Catholic Church, to acknowledge sexual abuse as a large-scale reality;

d) there was almost no research, dependable data, or other resources to respond to the reporting of deaf people that they had, in fact, been victims of and were now trying to survive, childhood sexual abuse.

As I started to make phone calls, write letters seeking information, and, for the most part, get rebuffed by so-called experts in the fields of both deafness and sexual abuse, I finally was able to meet a group of wonderful people from various fields of disability – deafness, physical disability, developmental disabilities, autism, mental health – all of whom were having experiences similar to mine. Starting in the late 1980’s and continuing to this day, we worked at trying to collect information re: the sexual abuse of children with disabilities, the responses of agencies public and private, and strategies to prevent the abuse.

Without becoming encyclopedic, I wish to enumerate what I have, over the past 32 years of deaf ministry learned about abuse, deafness, prevention, and the possibilities of healing.

1) 75% of all sexual abuse occurs in FAMILY SITUATIONS. Parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, “pseudo-relatives”- all have been predators. Recent research has pointed out that a growing number of children are sexual victims of older siblings, especially if the sibling is more than five years older than the victim, a “step-sibling”, or the child is disabled. Also, rates of sexual abuse are HIGHER in families where there is also a history of domestic violence and/or substance abuse.

2) Children with disabilities and/or deafness suffer sexual abuse 2.2 times more than their non-disabled, hearing peers. In those parts of the world where war, famine, displacement, serious poverty exists, these numbers are even higher.

3) Adults (hearing, hard of hearing, deaf; disabled, non-disabled) who were victims of sexual abuse as children have higher rates of divorce, alcoholism/substance abuse, anger/violence, depression, physical illnesses, and suicide. In addition, these people have much greater difficulty entering into and sustaining healthy adult relationships. The factor of deafness or disability compounds these consequences.

4) Private organizations, public agencies, professional journals/workshops, religious entities - all of whom profess an interest and concern re: the reality of sexual abuse, routinely discriminate against people with disabilities, deny the extent of the problem, and do little or nothing to respond to this reality. One of the largest, most well-attended International Conferences on Child Maltreatment in 2010 will offer over 300 workshops; ONLY two will address the issue of the abuse of children with disabilities or abuse in families where there is a disabled person.

5) Law enforcement and child protective services routinely miss, deny, minimize, under- or misreport the sexual abuse of children who are deaf and/or disabled. Often, prosecutors refuse to bring substantiated cases to trial because they fear losing the case as opposed to exposing the facts of the crime.

6) In attempting to deal with its own failings in the matter of the sexual abuse of children, the Church has done little to acknowledge what has happened to deaf children. The Church has been extremely slow to respond to the claims of deaf and disabled people about their experiences of sexual and/or physical abuse. In its programs to change the culture in the Church re: sexual abuse, programs aimed at Church workers and/or parents have ignored the needs of deaf and disabled individuals. (Video-programs developed as part of the Church’s training programs were not captioned until people in deaf ministry confronted this issue.)

The Catholic Church has not been alone in this. Every religious group – EVERY RELIGIOUS GROUP – has been reluctant to admit the existence of sexual abuse, that religious group’s complicity in covering up the abuse, and its failure to respond in particular to the victimization of child members who were deaf and/or disabled. A number of deaf people do not attend any Church or religious function because:

a) they blame God for what happened to them/not protecting them; or,

b) the religious setting was where the abuse happened; or,

c) they sought help from the Church, and they were turned away.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

The single most important thing we can do about sexual abuse of deaf children is to face the issue of COMMUNICATION ABUSE. DR. SUE MATHER, Ph.D. is an expert in this field. The sexual abuse of deaf children directly stems from the unwillingness, inability, or refusal of people (parents, families, medical personnel, educators, therapists/social workers/counselors, law enforcement ) to accept that the primary language of deaf children is sign-language.

Sexual predators understand this better than most so-called professionals. In one famous case, the sexual predator molested at least 60 deaf boys over a period of at least ten years. The predator himself was skilled in sign-language. He only molested deaf boys who did not use their voices and who had hearing parents. Why? Because he knew that most hearing parents did not understand sign-language, were embarrassed by graphic sexual signs, and would probably not believe what their sons were telling them. Therefore, we as a Church must….

.…recognize that sign-language IS the language of most deaf people and make sure our programs, liturgies, pastoral activities, religious education programs recognize that fact;

.…demand that all Church workers and volunteers receive extensive training re: sexual abuse of children and subject themselves to a criminal background check;

.…require that all Church workers and volunteers be mandated reporters, required to report any suspicions or allegations of sexual abuse directly to child protective services/law enforcement;

.…educate the parents of deaf and hard of hearing children re: the issue of sexual abuse. Offer sign-language classes, and teach them sexual signs;

.…involve more deaf people in ministry. Deaf children and adult deaf survivors are MORE likely to communicate with a deaf person than a hearing person when the communication involves such personal and intense disclosures;

.…provide opportunities for adult deaf survivors to share their stories in a confidential, healing environment; and,

….as a Church confess our failings to protect deaf children from abuse and to respond pastorally to the needs of adult deaf survivors of abuse.

Reverend Joseph A. Mulcrone

Archdiocese of Chicago