The One Adult Who Makes a Difference
Sexual Abuse, Protection, and the Restoration of Dignity
Sexual abuse of children may have extensive consequences for self-understanding, the body, boundaries, trust, relationships, and mental health. Such experiences may leave behind shame, dissociation, bodily unrest, relational difficulties, and a fundamental uncertainty about one’s own worth. Yet knowledge of harmful consequences must never stand alone. If professional understanding only describes what is damaged, it may fail to see what can still be protected, strengthened, and restored. The question is therefore not only what sexual abuse may do to a person, but also what may make it possible to continue living with dignity.
In this question, the one adult may become decisive. Research on resilience and protective factors has long shown that children exposed to serious adversity do not develop in the same way. Some experience extensive and long-term difficulties. Others manage better than might be expected, given the severity of the burden. This does not mean that abuse can be minimised, or that children should be expected to “endure” violations if only they possess sufficient resources. Resilience must not be used to reduce society’s responsibility for protection. But research on protective factors shows that relationships, community, meaning, structure, and support may have considerable significance for how a child’s life develops after serious experiences.
Perhaps the most important protective factor is a warm and supportive relationship with at least one adult. If such a relationship is not found with the parents, another adult may become crucial. This may be a relative, teacher, coach, neighbour, public health nurse, child welfare worker, therapist, priest, social educator, or another adult who sees the child and is able to bear responsibility. The one adult cannot undo what has happened. But that adult can help ensure that the child is not left entirely alone with what has happened. This is a difference of fundamental ethical significance.
Children who are subjected to sexual abuse are often placed within a disturbed moral order. Guilt and shame may be misplaced. Boundaries may become unclear. Trust may become dangerous. The body may become foreign. Language may be absent. In such a situation, the one adult may help restore something of this order. Not through grand words or quick solutions, but through clarity, protection, calmness, and reliability. The child needs adults who communicate, directly and indirectly, that responsibility does not lie with the child, that the child’s boundaries matter, and that there are adults who can act without withdrawing.
This makes the adult’s role more comprehensive than emotional support alone. To be the one adult is not merely to be kind, comforting, or available. It is also to take responsibility for realities. If a child is still in danger, support without protection is insufficient. If a child discloses abuse, the adult must be able to act within the relevant professional, legal, and ethical frameworks. If the child does not disclose, but shows signs of serious distress, the adult must dare to wonder, ask careful questions, and seek necessary help. Kindness without action may be too weak. Action without sensitivity may become intrusive. The professional and moral challenge lies in uniting care with judgement.
Professionals carry a particular responsibility here. Many children do not disclose abuse directly. Some lack language. Some are threatened. Some protect the perpetrator. Some feel shame. Some fear that the family will fall apart. Some believe they will not be believed. Others express their burden through restlessness, sleep disturbances, bodily complaints, sexualised behaviour, self-harm, isolation, anger, or dissociation. If adults see only the behaviour, but do not ask what it may express, the child may remain unseen. The one adult is often the person who does not dismiss the signals simply because they are unclear.
This does not mean that the adult should interpret everything as a sign of abuse. Such an attitude would be professionally irresponsible. Children’s difficulties may have many causes. But it does mean that adults who work with children must have a basic preparedness for the possibility that serious violations may be hidden behind diffuse expressions. They must be able to tolerate uncertainty without becoming passive. They must be able to ask questions without pressing. They must be able to listen without taking over. They must be able to act without creating unnecessary drama. The one adult is not the one who knows everything, but the one who takes the child’s possible reality seriously.
The significance of such an adult can also be understood in light of attachment theory. Bowlby shows how children need a secure base: a relationship in which the child can seek protection, regulation, and support, and from which the child can gradually explore the world. Sexual abuse, especially when it occurs in close relationships, may destroy precisely this sense of security. The child may learn that adults are dangerous, that closeness may involve risk, and that trust may lead to violation. A safe adult cannot simply repair this. But the adult can represent a counter-experience. The child may experience that an adult can see without exploiting, listen without condemning, and act without disappearing.
Such counter-experiences are central to restoration. Human beings are shaped not only by what harms them, but also by the relationships that later confirm their dignity. This applies to both children and adults. An adult who was previously subjected to abuse may also need relationships in which boundaries are respected, language is given time, and bodily reactions are understood without suspicion or sensationalism. Restoration does not take place only in the therapy room. It may also occur in school, work, friendship, family, voluntary communities, and professional encounters in which the person is met as more than their history of harm.
Resilience must therefore be understood relationally and socially, not merely individually. It is insufficient to ask why some people “manage” better than others, as if resilience were primarily an inner quality. Children’s possibilities for coping depend on environments, adults, institutions, and cultural narratives. A child who receives support, structure, safety, and recognition has different possibilities from a child who is met with mistrust, silence, or chaos. Strengthening the child’s resources is important, but those resources must have a place in which to operate.
Schools and leisure arenas may therefore become highly significant. A structured school day can provide predictability in a life otherwise marked by insecurity. Leisure activities can provide mastery, bodily experience, community, and social belonging. Creative expression can give form to experiences that cannot yet be spoken directly. Positive communities may counteract isolation. Such arenas must not be romanticised. They too may fail. But when they function well, they can give the child experiences of competence, continuity, and recognition.
This shows that help after sexual abuse is not only a task for specialist mental health services. It also belongs to kindergartens, schools, child welfare services, police, the legal system, general practitioners, public health services, crisis centres, voluntary organisations, faith communities, and local communities. Abuse occurs within relationships and social contexts. Protection and restoration must therefore also be relational and societal. The one adult may be decisive, but the one adult should not stand alone. A society that takes children’s dignity seriously must build institutions that make it possible for adults to see, act, and support.
This requires competence. Good will is not enough. Adults must know something about shame, trauma reactions, dissociation, child development, loyalty, dependency, perpetrator strategies, silence, and long-term consequences. They must also understand their own roles and boundaries. A teacher is not a therapist. A therapist is not an investigator. A child welfare worker is not a judge. But everyone must understand enough to act appropriately within their responsibility. Interdisciplinarity is therefore not merely an ideal word, but a necessity. The child’s situation may be too complex for one profession to carry the whole understanding alone.
At the same time, competence must be joined with humility. Abuse cases are often difficult. They may be marked by uncertainty, denial, conflicting information, loyalty conflicts, and strong emotions. Professionals may err both by acting too little and by acting too quickly. Professional judgement is therefore needed. Judgement involves the ability to use general knowledge in concrete situations where the answer is not always given in advance. It requires the capacity to listen, investigate, cooperate, document, protect, and at the same time respect the dignity of the person.
This also involves a responsibility to avoid secondary violation. Children and adults who have been subjected to abuse may be harmed again if they are met with mistrust, minimisation, unnecessary suspicion, cold case management, or intrusive curiosity. The helping system cannot guarantee that everything will become well, but it can work to ensure that the person subjected to abuse does not once again lose control over their own story and dignity. The one adult who makes a difference is often the person who understands that the form of help is part of the help.
This also applies in encounters with people who have themselves committed abuse and seek help. Working with perpetrators is professionally and ethically demanding, but necessary if further abuse is to be prevented. Accountability must be clear. Abuse must not be explained away, psychologised, or relativised. At the same time, treatment and work toward change must be possible. A society that seeks to protect children must not only help those who have been subjected to abuse. It must also develop measures that can prevent people from committing new abuses. This requires a form of professional knowledge that can maintain guilt and responsibility without abandoning the possibility of change.
Relatives and other close persons also constitute an important, but often burdened, group. Parents, siblings, partners, children, and others close to those involved may be drawn into a landscape of shock, doubt, shame, guilt, grief, anger, and conflicts of loyalty. Some have failed. Some have not known. Some have tried to protect. Some have themselves been caught in dependency, fear, or denial. Nuance is needed here as well. To understand the situation of relatives does not mean removing adult responsibility. But it does mean acknowledging that sexual abuse harms more than the person directly subjected to it. It may disturb entire relational systems.
The concluding perspective must nevertheless be the child. The fundamental ethical obligation is to protect children from sexual abuse and to meet children and adults who have been subjected to abuse with dignity. All professional knowledge must be tested against this. Diagnoses, methods, procedures, theories, and institutional arrangements have value insofar as they contribute to seeing, protecting, understanding, and restoring. They lose value if they make the child invisible, the story silent, or responsibility unclear.
The one adult who makes a difference does not need to be heroic. Often the difference is more sober: an adult who notices change, asks one more time, tolerates a difficult answer, documents properly, reports concern, follows up, persists, cooperates, and does not allow the child to disappear into the system. Such help may seem modest. But for the child, it may represent a break with the logic of abuse. Where the abuse made the child an object, the adult meets the child as a subject. Where the abuse created silence, the adult opens space for language. Where the abuse distorted responsibility, the adult places responsibility where it belongs. Where the abuse broke trust, the adult shows that some forms of trust may be justified.
This is the concluding point of the series. Sexual abuse may inflict deep and long-lasting harm, but the history of harm is not the whole history of the human being. There are also histories of protection, coping, help, slow restoration, and dignity. These histories often begin not with large systems, but with one human being who sees another human being. An adult who dares to see. An adult who understands their responsibility. An adult who remains present long enough for the child no longer to be entirely alone.
The one adult cannot remove what happened. But the one adult can help ensure that what happened does not come to define everything. This is a limited, but decisive, form of hope. Not a hope that minimises the abuse, but a hope grounded in responsibility, knowledge, protection, and human dignity.
Author’s Afterword
This essay series is based on many years of work with sexual abuse, shame, trauma reactions, professional responsibility, and human dignity. It has been written in a professional and restrained form, but behind that form are many encounters that have made a lasting impression.
I wish to express my respectful gratitude to the many hundreds of children and adults who, over more than four decades, have spoken about experiences of sexual abuse and its consequences. Their stories have conveyed not only pain, but also insight, courage, survival, and a clear reminder of how important it is that adults dare to see.
I also wish to thank those who have themselves committed abuse and who have sought help after serving a sentence. Many abusers have told me about sexual abuse they themselves were exposed to as children. Encounters with them have underscored the importance of clear accountability, but also the necessity of treatment, prevention, and professional work that may prevent new violations.
My thanks also go to relatives and others close to those involved. Many have stood in difficult landscapes of grief, guilt, shame, doubt, loyalty, anger, and responsibility. Their experiences remind us that sexual abuse does not affect only individuals, but also relationships, families, and communities.
Finally, I wish to thank dedicated professionals in many different helping professions: in child welfare, health care, education, the police, the legal system, therapy, social work, voluntary organisations, and other contexts. Over four decades, many have opened their professional spaces, shared experiences, raised difficult questions, and carried responsibility in cases where simple answers are rarely available.
This series is written in respect for all these encounters. It is also written from the conviction that professional knowledge gains its full significance only when it is used to protect children, meet those who have been subjected to abuse with dignity, place responsibility correctly, and strengthen the one adult who can make a difference.
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