Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

She [the child in the story] should) scream. I wouldn’t want my uncle to put his hand on
my bottom. I’d be uncomfortable. I wouldn’t kick him, but, then, my uncle wouldn’t do that, I
don’t think. If he’d come over again, someone should just tell
him Mary is not home, that she’s
at a friend’s house. If I was home, I’d lock my
door. She probably felt embarrassed. She could
hop out of bed and run. She shouldn’t listen to her uncle when he does something wrong. See, grownups
can tell you what to do if you do the wrong thing, but you tell yourself (what to do) if
the grown-ups do the wrong thing. She could slap him, bite him, and tell her parents. It just
doesn’t seem right for an uncle to do something like that… (Burkhardt, 1991).
While the response of the nine-year-old child is considerably more developed and sensible than that
of the six-year-old, in most actual situations of childhood sexual abuse, children do not respond and report,
and sometimes fail to even recognize, the abuse the way their responses may suggest (Child 2011). This
effect is due in large part to their cognitive vulnerability:
Children are not only physically unsuited to resist adult advances, but their reasoning
capabilities may be inadequate to meet the social demand of responding to an adult’s abusive use of
authority. Also, it is possible that even when a child
might know that a response is needed, he
or she may be unable to determine or execute an effective response. Research in cognitive development,
particularly in the realm of social cognition, has made strides in identifying the qualities and
quantitative differences between childhood reasoning and adult logic (Burkhardt 1991).
Additionally, there is a question regarding what children are instructed to do in response to an
inappropriate directive by an adult. For example, “Say No and Go” was popular in the 1980s. Parents would
instruct their children that, in a “stranger danger” situation, the child should say “no,” and “go,” or flee the
situation as fast as possible (Burkhardt 1986). Similarly, it is difficult to determine how effective a
resistance and reporting strategy might actually be. One element of children’s compliance with perpetrators
and their failure to resist and report sexual abuse may have to do with the degree of authority attributed to
the perpetrator.
Such differences account for the gap between what a child knows and what s/he understands,
which was the focus of Burkhardt’s study. A child may know it’s wrong to be touched inappropriately, but
does not necessarily know why, except for the fact that a parent instructed the child to believe this, or that
such touching may feel uncomfortable. But, if the child does know what to do, why is the rate of childhood
sexual abuse so high? The child may theoretically know what should be done, but may not be able to
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