When Shame Remains with the One Who Was Not to Blame

Sexual Abuse, Moral Confusion, and Professional Responsibility

Sexual abuse of children is not only a violation of bodily integrity. It is also a violation of the child’s self-understanding, trust, and capacity to experience themselves as a person of worth. Abuse therefore affects the child not only in the moment in which it occurs, but may also shape the child’s later relationship to their own body, to other people, and to questions of guilt, shame, and responsibility. One of the most serious long-term consequences is that shame often remains with the person who was not to blame.

This is a fundamental ethical and professional problem. Guilt and shame are not the same. Guilt concerns actions and responsibility: What have I done? Shame reaches more deeply into the self: Who am I? Guilt may be connected to a specific action that can be acknowledged, regretted, or repaired. Shame, by contrast, attacks the person’s sense of worth. Where guilt says, “I did something wrong,” shame says, “There is something wrong with me” (Tangney & Dearing, 2002). After sexual abuse, this distinction may become distorted. The person who was abused may come to carry a sense of impurity, complicity, or inferiority, even though responsibility clearly belongs to the perpetrator.

This is particularly serious when the abuse takes place in childhood. A child does not possess the adult’s cognitive, linguistic, or moral resources for understanding what is happening. The child is dependent on adults, both for protection and for the interpretation of reality. When the adult who should have protected the child instead violates the child, a fundamental confusion arises. The child cannot necessarily place guilt where it belongs. Instead, the child may attempt to preserve some form of order by directing guilt and shame inward. This may be psychologically understandable, but ethically it represents a radical misplacement of responsibility.

Judith Herman (1992) describes how prolonged and relational trauma may affect self-experience, affect regulation, and the ability to trust others. This is also central to more recent understandings of complex trauma. In ICD-11, complex post-traumatic stress disorder is described as a condition in which trauma responses are expressed not only through re-experiencing, avoidance, and a persistent sense of threat, but also through difficulties in affect regulation, negative self-concept, and disturbances in relationships (World Health Organization, 2022). These descriptions are clinical, but they also point toward a practical-philosophical question: What happens to a person’s possibility of living as a subject when, early in life, they are made into an object of another person’s power, desire, or violence?

Shame is not merely an inner feeling. It is also social. It arises and is sustained within relationships, through glances, silence, insinuations, and cultural ideas about purity, sexuality, responsibility, and normality. A person who has been subjected to abuse may therefore feel shame not only about what happened, but also about the body’s reactions, about their own silence, about later symptoms, and about not having “moved on.” Shame is thus attached not only to the past, but also to the present. It may follow the person into intimate relationships, parenthood, work, treatment, and encounters with helping services.

This makes professional language crucial. A careless question may intensify shame: Why did you not say anything? Why did you go back? Why did you not tell anyone earlier? Why do you react like this now? Such questions may in some contexts be professionally relevant, but they may also communicate an indirect accusation. They may imply that the person subjected to abuse ought to have acted differently, understood more, or protected themselves better. In encounters with people who have been sexually abused, professionals must therefore distinguish sharply between explanation and responsibility. It may be necessary to understand why a child remained silent, why an adolescent developed self-destructive strategies, or why an adult struggles with trust and intimacy. But understanding must never become a renewed allocation of blame.

Shame may also be concealed behind symptoms. It may appear as social withdrawal, self-contempt, substance use, eating disorders, self-harm, sexual difficulties, aggression, or apparent indifference. If these expressions are understood only as behavioural problems, the professional may overlook the history that the symptoms are attempting to carry. A trauma-informed understanding does not mean that all difficulties should be explained by trauma. That would be professionally irresponsible. It does mean, however, that professionals must dare to ask what a person has been subjected to, not only what is wrong with them.

Here lies an important corrective to a narrow diagnostic way of thinking. Diagnoses may be useful. They may provide language, rights, access to treatment, and professional structure. But diagnoses may also obscure the moral and relational content of experience. When a person who has been sexually abused is described as depressed, unstable, self-destructive, avoidant, or difficult, clinical language becomes too narrow if it does not also include the question of violation, power, and responsibility. Otherwise, the person risks being defined through their reactions, while the violation itself disappears from view.

The practical-philosophical concern is therefore to insist that the human being cannot be reduced to symptoms. A person who has been subjected to sexual abuse is not primarily a case, a diagnosis, or a collection of long-term consequences. They are a human being who has been subjected to a serious violation of dignity. This perspective is not an alternative to professional knowledge, but a condition for using professional knowledge wisely. Without a perspective grounded in dignity, even advanced theory may become cold. Without trauma knowledge, moral concern may become naïve.

Working with shame after abuse is therefore not only a matter of reducing symptoms. It is also a matter of restoring a more truthful moral order. Guilt must be placed where it belongs. The child’s silence must be understood in light of dependency, fear, loyalty, confusion, and power. The body’s reactions must be understood as responses to overwhelming strain, not as signs of moral weakness. Self-destructive strategies must be met as expressions of pain and survival, not as grounds for condemnation.

This does not mean that people should be held in a victim identity. On the contrary. An important part of recovery is that the person may gradually become more than what happened to them. But this cannot occur through minimisation or through demands that they simply “put it behind them.” It requires a process in which experience can be given language, responsibility can be placed correctly, and the person can regain a sense of being an acting and dignified subject. Herman (1992) describes recovery from trauma as a process in which safety, remembrance, mourning, and restored connection become central. These are not merely therapeutic stages. They are also ethically meaningful movements: from danger to safety, from silence to language, from isolation to community, from shame to dignity.

For professionals, this entails a particular responsibility. The person subjected to abuse does not primarily need moral instruction, quick explanations, or premature narratives of hope. What is needed is a professional and human space in which the story can be borne without being met with rejection, sensationalism, minimisation, or suspicion. To encounter shame requires care. The professional must be able to listen without taking over, ask without pressing, understand without excusing the perpetrator, and support without making the person dependent on the professional’s interpretation.

Sexual abuse often creates a world in which boundaries have been broken, responsibility has been distorted, and trust has been damaged. Help must therefore be marked by the opposite: clear boundaries, correct attribution of responsibility, and the slow rebuilding of trust. This is also a societal responsibility. Shame must not be individualised in such a way that the person subjected to abuse is left alone with it. Shame belongs in the social and moral space in which the violation was able to occur, to be silenced, or to be explained away. A society that wishes to take sexual abuse seriously must therefore ask not only how the person subjected to abuse can be treated. It must also ask how adults, institutions, and professions can become better at seeing, protecting, listening, and acting.

When shame remains with the one who was not to blame, something has gone wrong also after the abuse. The violation is then not merely historical. It is continued through silence, mistrust, and misplaced responsibility. Professionally and ethically responsible work must therefore help move shame away from the person subjected to abuse and back into the moral order where it belongs: to the act, to the perpetrator, and to the contexts that failed to protect.

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.). American Psychiatric Association Publishing.

Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Clinical applications of attachment theory. Routledge.

Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence—from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.

Herman, J. L. (1992). Complex PTSD: A syndrome in survivors of prolonged and repeated trauma. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 5(3), 377–391. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.2490050305

Pettersen, K. T. Consequences of sexual abuse [PowerPoint lectures between 2002 - 2024)].

Tangney, J. P., & Dearing, R. L. (2002). Shame and guilt. Guilford Press.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

World Health Organization. (2022). ICD-11: International classification of diseases (11th rev.). https://icd.who.int/

Sexual abuse often creates a world in which boundaries have been broken, 

responsibility has been distorted, and trust has been damaged.

This essay was developed from my own professional practice as a social worker and my many lectures on sexual abuse over a periode of more than 40 years (1981-2024). The text was written in a conversation with OpenAU/ChatGPT.