The ultimate betrayal - mothers who bash

By JAN CORBETT In the words of the sentencing judge, the most fundamental relationship between a mother and her child had been dramatically compromised. From the time her son was 8 years old, this woman - Pakeha, for the record - forced him to have sex with her two or three times each week. She left him bruised on the outside; on the inside, he often thought about suicide. The psychologists say the boy may never be able to form a long-term monogamous relationship or be able to separate sex from violence. The mother may have created a future sexual abuser. She was herself a victim of childhood sexual abuse, and Justice Sir David Tompkins found it hard to understand how she could subject her own child to such misery. Sentencing her last Tuesday to six years in prison, he said: “If there is one person a child should be able to trust it is that person’s mother.” But as this and a recent spate of child abuse cases suggests, what is traditionally seen as an inviolable relationship of love and protection between mother and child is violated more often than we realise. Last week alone: * A 25-year-old Nelson mother was charged with assault after her 3-month old son was admitted to hospital with head injuries. * A nineteen-year-old was jailed for five months for seriously assaulting her 1-year-old son after a session of alcohol, drug and solvent abuse. * Hamilton woman Belinda Edmonds, 32, was jailed for five years for killing her 6-year-old daughter, Mereana. She kicked the child so hard her head smashed against a wall, bouncing her brain around in her skull. Edmonds’ partner, Dorothy Tipene, 31, was jailed for 18 months for cruelty to the child. Society is used to the idea of protecting women and children from violent men. And the customary belief is that children are better off with their mother after a marriage breakup. But how do we react to international studies showing that women are the more frequent child abusers? These figures come from overseas studies because Child, Youth and Family Services does not record who commits family violence. Ministry of Justice figures on convictions for child abuse show that last year, women accounted for 28 per cent of the convictions for physical abuse of children, but none of the sexual abuse. But, says Dr Felicity Goodyear-Smith, a research fellow at Auckland University who has not been afraid to challenge conventional child-abuse wisdom, take out sexual abuse and women turn out to be responsible for the majority of physical and emotional abuse of children. She cites a 1993 Canadian study which found that women and men meted out physical abuse in nearly equal proportions (39 per cent and 40 per cent), but women accounted for 79 per cent of emotional abuse cases and 85 per cent of the cases of neglect. Stuart Birks, director of Massey University’s Centre for Public Policy Evaluation, quotes 1998 Child Abuse and Neglect National Statistics from the USA showing that 60 per cent of child abusers were women and that the most common type of abuse was being neglected by the mother. The same figures show that 56 per cent of child sex attack victims were abused by men, a point that surprised Mr Birks. “It means 44 per cent of sexual abuse victims were not abused by males,” he says. “That is, they were abused by females.” Women and men are also believed to figure about equally in statistics on adults who kill children. But women are more likely to kill very young children, either because they want to conceal that they have given birth or they are affected by post-natal depression. Men are more likely to kill older children. That women are the main child abusers is considered unsurprising because they spend more time with their young than men do. But Lesley Max, executive director of the Pacific Foundation for Health, Education and Parent Support, says most people still believe that “family violence is solely male violence.” “The extent of women’s violence against children needs to be explored,” she says. Fay Lilian, manager of the Anger Change Trust, which runs programmes for parents at risk of abusing their children, agrees. When people talk about family violence, she says, they usually mean men’s violence towards women and children. Yet men and women caused deliberate physical injury to children in equal numbers. “I believe there is some minimising of women’s violence towards children.” Lesley Max wants the case of every child who dies violently to be reviewed by a team of experts. Until this happens, she says, we will not have the complete picture on child abuse. She says women abusing their children is certainly not new, but it has been less visible because it is rare for a mother to kill an older child. Although no one can say if women’s abuse of children is increasing - or why - it is becoming more visible for several reasons. One is that, like all family violence, it is less socially acceptable than it once was, so social agencies are more likely to intervene, forcing it into the spotlight and into the statistics. Another is that women are becoming more violent. Although they commit only 14 per cent of violent crime, their rate of involvement in such crime has increased 135 per cent in the past 10 years. Some suggest this is the perverse outcome of the campaign that told girls they could do anything. Others say it is simply that the police now take female violence more seriously. But the greatest and newest factor likely to result in child abuse by women is being a young solo mother. Says forensic psychiatrist Dr Sandy Simpson: “Kids are still being born at a considerable rate, but the social and family constructions that go with good child-rearing aren’t there.” So why is it all right to have fatherless households during wartime, but not once peace breaks out? The difference, says Dr Simpson, is that wars tend to create “an intense grouping together of people and huge social cohesion.” “Social cohesion is not something we have a great deal of now. Says Dr Goodyear-Smith: “As well as single parenting, child abuse and neglect are strongly correlated with poorly educated parents, unemployment, poor housing and welfare reliance.” So instead of being socially cohesive, ours is a society in which vulnerable groups have come unstuck. And people who have never known love and nurturing do not know how to love and nurture. Similarly, says social worker Garry Glanville, speaking as a member of the Children’s Agenda lobby group, “a woman raised in a family where she was terrorised may terrorise her own family.” Mr Glanville says that while women’s changing role in society may be making them more combative, he has also seen cases where women have claimed responsibility for abuse to protect a man they want to protect or fear. Experts are wondering whether these women are struggling with a form of battered women’s syndrome, or whether their need for a relationship with a man outweighs their instinct to protect the child. This degree of analysis about why women commit child abuse, or are complicit in it, sets them apart from the way we view male abusers. Says Dr Goodyear-Smith: “Women are taught that when they’re violent they’re not to blame. Men are always to blame.”