More than a quarter of Australians were sexually abused as children, generally experiencing child sexual abuse (CSA) multiple times. Complex trauma often ensues and has been associated with substantial and pervasive long-term emotional, psychological, physical, behavioural, interpersonal, and financial impacts.

The National Centre for Action on Child Sexual Abuse recently conducted the Australian child sexual abuse attitudes, knowledge and response study, surveying a nationally representative sample of over 4,000 adults. Data collected using an online questionnaire explored the Australian community’s understanding of, and responses to CSA.  

In relation to understanding the impacts of CSA, results showed that 80-90% of participants knew that victim-survivors of CSA often experience difficulties with relationships, substance use, and psychological health. However, fewer (60-70%) recognised more distal impacts on basic needs throughout adulthood such as disruptions to job-, housing-, and financial-security, and poorer physical health. Importantly, 13% of respondents thought there were no ongoing impacts of CSA and 33% didn’t understand the impacts well enough to respond appropriately to an adult’s disclosure of CSA. In responding to a hypothetical regarding an adult friend’s disclosure, 24% said they couldn’t connect with their friend’s pain (another 30% were unsure), and 5% would try to avoid their friend. Overall, these results demonstrate the community’s limited understanding of CSA-related complex trauma, which means that victim-survivors may be unsupported or misunderstood at important points in their life.  

Victim-survivors may seek therapeutic and support services to aid their recovery. Given the broad impacts, many workforces, not just specialist services, will encounter CSA-victim-survivors. We explore how practitioners can implement evidence-based initiatives to strengthen adults’ understanding of the needs of child and adult CSA victim-survivors, foster compassionate and supportive responses, and deepen the community’s understanding of the impacts of CSA and complex trauma, thereby enhancing healing and recovery from CSA.

The relationship between childhood trauma and incarceration is complex and interconnected.  Individuals who experience trauma in their early years from abuse, neglect, or exposure to violence are put at a risk of engaging in behaviours that lead to incarceration later in life.  Trauma effects the brain and can lead to mental health issues such as depression, anxiety and PTSD that can contribute to criminal activities. Many who experience childhood trauma develop survival-based coping strategies that can increase the likelihood that they will become involved in the criminal justice system. Adverse Childhood Experiences like abuse and household dysfunction are contributing factors to incarceration.  Early exposure to the criminal justice system through juvenile detention leads people to further trauma of being incarcerated as an adult.

Through my professional experience working with youth who are in foster care, some of which are incarcerated in juvenile detention centers and working as a student in parole and  as a Prisoner Advocate with many men and women who are incarcerated, I have seen first hand that childhood trauma of contributed to their criminal behaviour.  Through my personal experience as a Prison Wife to a Wrongfully Convicted Indigenous Lifer I see that childhood trauma has long-term effects on people later on in life.  I watched my husband suffer from his childhood trauma and after years of suffering from his past, growing up in foster care, being wrongfully convicted, serving life and the abuses that he went through in prison he has healed.  I share our story of trauma and healing to bring awareness to those who work with incarcerated individuals to be mindful of what brings an individual to engage in criminal activity and to bring hope to those who suffer from childhood trauma hoping  to prevent others from going through all that we have endured.

Childhood trauma leaves the ego riven and cracked. It shatters our ability to synthesise, to maintain the integrity of experience. To cope with this threat of fracture, parts of our internal world remain unintegrated, repressed into the recesses of the mind so that we can maintain coherence. Yet, this survival strategy always comes at a cost. The mind and body must dynamically and continually hold down what is unintegrated, like a buoy held under the water, ever pushing to rise to the surface. This downward force requires the creation of mechanisms and structures within the developing personality, which both ensure our survival in a challenging world, and lead to chronic and compulsive personality patterns which can restrict growth and cause psychiatric symptoms. 

Childhood adversity remains the most consistent risk factor for chronic suffering and mental illness, yet, both psychological and psychiatric treatments tend to focus on the compulsive presenting symptoms rather than the underlying cause. We have created a mental health system whereby we silo suffering into categories that do not exist in nature. Rather than focus on humans as complex systems within a particular environment, we treat symptoms of ever-expanding diagnoses. Rather than encourage integration, we engage in suppression of symptoms. 

Psychedelic Assisted Therapy (PAT) offers a different path. PAT allows the long-suffering individual a way through their labyrinthine pain. It allows clarity where there was confusion, and awareness where there was darkness. Neuroscientifically, Friston's Free-Energy Principle lays the foundations for an understanding of psychedelics which far surpasses that of traditional psychiatric medications. Combined with qualitative research, a complex picture emerges of healing and integration, whereby the compulsive and protective aspects of our personalities become malleable, allowing access to the previously unintegrated aspects of our-selves, offering healing rather than treatment, and humanity rather than reductionism.