"I'd kill them" is often a common reaction of people thinking themselves into the shoes of a woman whose child has been sexually abused by her partner or anyone else. It signifies both an attempt to deflect the pain with a simple remedy and the instinctive response of most mothers to their child's need for protection. Faced with the reality, women's reactions are considerably more complex. The central aim of Mothers Surviving Child Sexual Abuse is to demonstrate this complexity, and the way it is embedded in the social relations within which child sexual abuse occurs. Using in-depth interviews with fifteen women whose children have been sexually abused Carol-Ann Hooper explores how they experience and cope with the situation. How do they find out that sexual abuse, nearly always surrounded in secrecy, has occurred? How do they decide what action to take? How do they experience the responses of others - friends, kin, and professionals - and how do they cope with their own feelings? The answers to such difficult questions are crucial both to the children's safety and well-being and to successful professional intervention.
Informed by theory and research on other situation involving loss, secrecy and moral dilemmas, as well as the rapidly accumulating knowledge of child sexual abuse, Mothers Surviving Child Sexual Abuse offers a new analysis of mother's reactions and responses, presenting a fresh perspective on a shocking problem for practitioners and policy-makers involved in child protection, as well as students and lecturers of social work and social studies and women's studies.