Thread by @DrJessTaylor

I have to make this clear as a professional working in sexual abuse for over a decade:

If a child begins to hate, mutilate or harm their genitals, it’s a HUGE red flag for sexual abuse. That’s the main priority, not identity.

Safeguard immediately.

mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/t…

I very much doubt that this 3 year old was having some sort of deep identity crisis about the debate around sex and gender.

This is a child self-mutilating because there is something happening to them and they are in severe distress.

This is actually quite common.

You are not a bad professional, social worker, psychologist or therapist for recognising classic signs of sexual trauma in children. It doesn’t make you bigoted or harmful.

Loads of us have worked in abuse cases where children have done this, and it’s vital we pay attention

We can respect the child whilst simultaneously investigating the root of the trauma response. This is a trauma response. The child is distressed and as professionals, our duty is to protect this child effectively.

To be clear then:

It is a common trauma response to sexual abuse to hate, dislike, want to harm, want to cut off, want to remove, want to destroy, want to change, reject, deny and become repulsed by genitals and other body parts.

This has to remain the priority.

We have to do everything we can do give the child time and compassion to support them to process and understand the feelings of hate towards their genitals.

Many kids I worked with hated their genitals because they saw them as the ‘reason’ they were abused.

I’ve come across cases where, for example, boys wanted to cut off their genitals and present as girls because their abuser only targets boys and they thought they would be safer as girls, as their sisters were not targeted. They were usually older 9-15yrs old

In girls, I mostly came across cases where she wanted to harm, stab, cut, burn, remove, deny etc her breasts or vulva.

This was always seen as a common reaction to sexual abuse of girls - and something therapists have been used to working with for decades.

With national stats sitting at 1 in 5 British adults saying they were abused as children (CSEW), and 1 in 4 girls being sexually abused by the age of 12 in UK, and 1 in 20 boys being sexually abused before 12 (NSPCC) - sexual trauma is much more common than people realise.

So purely on numbers, we would expect millions of kids and adults to be struggling with sexual trauma that will often impact their perception and feelings of their bodies and genitals.

We cannot ignore the role of trauma in this.