"It will take at least 20 years to heal the community wound of child sexual abuse."

"There are many types of sexual abuse. Basically, child sexual abuse can occur in three settings:

• In the intrafamily space, which is a space of coexistence.
• In a safe space, which is where you take your children because you trust that they will be treated well.
• Public space, which is the street, public transport, etc.

Cases that occur in shared living spaces affect specific individuals, who are the victims and are very important, but they do not generate a social crisis unless the abuser is a very prominent figure. For example, if it is a teacher reported by their family and this could have a concrete impact on the school where they were teaching.

Social crises often arise in trusted environments, such as educational, leisure, or cultural institutions. In these settings, we encounter "professional abusers"—those who exploit their profession to gain access to children.

These cases have a devastating impact because we have the direct victims, who are the ones who have revealed the situations of abuse, but, on the other hand, there is a huge suspicion that there may be more victims who have not spoken out.

This generates immense distress among the families in this community who are worried that their son or daughter might be one of these victims who hasn't spoken up. At the same time, we find other people who have lived with the abuser, perhaps through friendship or a work relationship, and who must confront the disbelief and guilt of thinking they didn't notice anything. In other words, we have different members of the community wounded by a very specific event: child sexual abuse. When the abuse occurs between minors, which is now one in three cases, we have at least two families at odds, who may hold very opposing views, even going so far as to say we're exaggerating and that it's just kids being kids. Of course, when cases occur in large urban areas, the issue might be less noticeable, but when it happens in medium-sized or small towns, or more rural areas where everyone knows each other, it's a devastating bombshell that can completely change the life of the town.

Living with the aftereffects of childhood sexual abuse

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We also encounter social crises in cases where abuse has occurred in public settings . This sometimes happens due to the very nature of the case. This is what happened, for example, in the case of the Badalona gang rape, which involved the group abuse of minors in a shopping center.

Crises also arise with cases that have passed the statute of limitations , often involving religious congregations that continue to be educational agents. These are cases where very strong feelings emerge related to cover-ups, lies, and so on. And it's also necessary to manage the feelings of the teachers who are part of this community when cases arise, as they need to be emotionally strong to continue their educational work and protect their students. Even if these are old cases, these teachers can feel singled out, even if they haven't done anything wrong. It's complicated to manage.

"I have the feeling that Europe hasn't known how to do community work. We have hyper-individualistic cities where the community aspect hasn't been sufficiently nurtured or developed. And that's why we don't know how to manage the community when there's a crisis because we lack a sense of community. We even struggle to commit to our own neighborhood, which is a very close-knit environment! Communities, moreover, can be very complex. Imagine a school with a student body spread across a wide geographical area... it can be very complicated."

Despite this complexity, my professional experience tells us that there are times when you must adopt this community perspective and understand that there are secondary victims, who haven't been directly harmed because perhaps there wasn't abuse against your family member, but this doesn't prevent feelings of guilt, betrayal, shame, and mistrust from arising. Suddenly, there's a total lack of trust in a space you considered safe, and this shatters your life. We humans need to trust that everything will be alright to move through life with peace of mind.

I couldn't tell you if this sense of community has changed over the decades. What I do know is that I've been working on this for years, and now, in 2024, is when people are finally starting to hear about it.

"I did my first major community intervention ten years ago, and I remember going in without any references because there weren't any. There was nothing to guide us on how to do it, so I relied on my experience in group management. And I started that session badly. I began by saying something I've never said again. What happened was that I went there expecting to find a community that wanted to lynch the abuser, but I found a community that cared about that person. Of course, the situation was very different from what I had anticipated."

Ten years later, personally, I don't know of any other organization that does what we do at the Vicki Bernadet Foundation, and there aren't that many of us doing it either. From the outside, when we explain what we do, it might seem like a simple intervention, but it's not at all.

It is my experience of more than twenty years that guides me in actively listening to the people who make up that community, in giving psychoeducational guidelines to these responses I receive, and in containing and validating the emotions that arise.

I explain to them why I validate these emotions and help them understand why these things happen, why they feel this way. I also share everything I know about abusive figures and why they haven't recognized it. This is not easy to do when you're in front of 50 distressed people.

In this sense, we have learned from honesty and from a very broad understanding of the problem of child sexual abuse. We are fortunate that at the Foundation we do much more than just psychotherapeutic intervention. That is to say, we have worked with different protocols and we understand the concerns of the organizations; we have a strong presence in schools, carrying out prevention work, and we know well how teachers and students feel. All of this gives us a certain peace of mind when addressing situations that can be very complex and unpleasant.

"Working on community prevention is essential because protecting children is everyone's responsibility. Any organization that proposes an activity inviting families to bring their children assumes two key roles: care and protection. Therefore, they must demand of themselves that all their work be based on respectful treatment . This means that the entire organization works in the same way to ensure this respectful treatment, and that each person has the obligation to address any colleague who deviates from the agreed-upon guidelines for respectful treatment. And if they are ignored, they must be able to speak to the organization's management to report these behaviors. It is everyone's responsibility, but this means that we must first discuss many things within the organization regarding respectful treatment and children's rights."

What is good child care and what are children's rights?

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"Containment, metaphorically speaking, is like becoming a landfill where all the waste is sent to you, you store it and reuse it to turn it into fertilizer for flowers to grow. When you're practicing containment, people throw everything in your face because you ask them directly. And while that's happening, you look into that person's eyes empathetically, understanding why they say one thing and not another. That's why it's so difficult."

"It's very strange, but for me it's much easier to contain suffering, because I understand it, than to contain incomprehension. This year I had to deal with a situation where there was a complaint against a teacher, and all the other teachers decided the child was lying. I went there to find out how they were doing and I found people very angry that any student could accuse them of anything and they'd be fired. This was one of the most difficult sessions I've ever done because there are things I just don't understand. It was very difficult for me to put myself in their shoes because I wasn't looking at educators, but rather workers who were afraid of losing their jobs. That's legitimate, of course, but I find it very hard to understand people who don't empathize with a child who has spoken about a situation of abuse. I left very shaken, and if this had happened to me 20 years ago, perhaps I wouldn't have dedicated myself to this field." What I mean is that containing genuine suffering doesn't cost me anything; I know how to do it, and if I can bring peace to a few people, I already feel rewarded.

"When we intervene, the first thing we do is explain to the people in the affected community how abuse occurs so they understand that the abuser is highly controlling and manipulative . It's important for them to understand that the abuser manipulates not only the child but also everyone around them. There's always a feeling of guilt for not having noticed, but ultimately, the surrounding environment is also a victim of this manipulation."

“Professional abusers” are people who always operate in the same way: they are excellent workers. They do their job so well that, little by little, they cross boundaries, and the environment allows it because of the absolute trust they have, to the point that they manage to go unsupervised and create their own unsupervised spaces.

Of course, the other people don't know what's happening in those spaces. It's very interesting because when we explain all of this in the sessions, you see how their faces change because you're putting words to something they didn't know how to put into words. Words have the power to create a cognitive system, a way of understanding life. When we help them put words to something they can't understand, little by little and with a lot of pain, these people begin to grieve. Often there's immense pain because there's a lot of affection, a close relationship with the abuser, and this requires a period of mourning that we must respect. This psychoeducational aspect is fundamental and very important.

Then there is listening. We listen carefully to everything they tell us, we validate their feelings of grief, their difficulty in understanding, their affection for the abuser…

"Requests can reach us in various ways, but usually the affected organization itself contacts us. They typically get in touch after public authorities tell them they can't provide this service, because there aren't enough people who can stand in front of a group impacted by a situation of child sexual abuse, with all that it entails. It's not something that's taught. We can do it because we've been doing it for many years, because of our knowledge of how abuse happens."

"It's difficult to answer. The first case we handled, at the request of the school itself, lasted three years because it was a rural area, and the families ended up leaving the village. I remember that my first intervention was with the families, in a session with 70 people; we worked with the faculty and students, held training workshops, and provided support to prepare for the following school year. Some time later, we saw that there were still many rumors circulating because a clear account of what had happened hadn't been given. So we continued working with the school and the families to find a solution and put the matter to rest."

In other situations, we find that a specific case is reported in the press, an intervention is carried out with families, and that's where it ends. Many factors influence this; it depends on the starting point, the circumstances under which we begin working, and how we manage the intervention from that point onward.

Each case takes us to different places.

There's no single, clear methodology, but for me there are three fundamental points: psychoeducation, active and empathetic listening, and validating feelings. To this I would add being honest, never lying, saying what I know and what I don't, and never taking sides.

I never go in with absolute certainties, and I try to be very direct with the words I use. We have to name things and warn people that what we're going to talk about will be painful. We also know that there will surely be someone in that room who has suffered abuse and that all of this will have stirred up a lot of emotions for them, and that we also have to know how to manage those emotions.

"It takes 20 years for an educational, sports, leisure, or cultural organization to truly recover from a situation of child sexual abuse. In the case of schools, for example, you need those in preschool (P3) to finish school, and in the case of younger siblings, the same applies. This takes approximately 20 years. During this time, you can make amends if you do things right. That is to say, there are organizations that have done well and have even emerged stronger from the situation. Ultimately, in cases of child sexual abuse, the most important mediating factor, both at the individual level of the primary victim and at the level of secondary victims, is the social response you receive ."

For the person who has suffered abuse, the social response they need is credibility and support. At the community level, the necessary response is for the organization where the abuse occurred to take responsibility and implement the necessary mechanisms to prevent it from happening again. The community is quite understanding when it recognizes that the perpetrator abused their professional position, but for this to happen , the organization must be completely transparent from the outset, assume responsibility, and make itself available. It is crucial not to cover anything up and to have a truthful account that explains everything that can be explained, and that everyone in the community involved in the case adheres to this account. This is the only form of redress I know, but it requires time.