Taipei Times: In the 10 years since its founding, the Dandelion Treatment Center (
Wang Yueh-hao (
PHOTO: GEORGE TSORNG, TAIPEI TIMES
This is most likely because back then, only older women had enough resources and support to report instances of sexual abuse; children very rarely report sexual abuse themselves, unless they have an adult helping them. Furthermore, it is easier to report an assault from a stranger. It is much more difficult to report someone you know, especially someone in your family. On an individual case by case basis, to this day, it is the hardest to handle cases that involve domestic sexual abuse. So from in this area, we became aware of the importance of increasing awareness about sexual abuse of children in the home.
Now there are related laws, such as the Sexual Abuse Prevention Act (
About 62 percent of our cases are adult women who have sought us out; the rest are typically children's cases that have been referred to us by the Ministry of the Interior or other organizations.
TT: What usually motivates these women to come in contact with you?
Wang: The classic cases that we come in contact with are women aged between 25 and 35, when they enter the stage of their lives when they begin to have intimate relationships with other people. Commonly, these women's experiences with sexual abuse prove to be barriers in the healthy development of their relationships with people, especially those of the opposite sex. Whether it's because they are having problems in their personal lives, or because they are getting outside pressure from family members that are encouraging them to get married, they start to come across problems.
Often, also, we have cases where women who were sexually abused as children are now mothers themselves. In those cases, once a woman becomes a mother, she becomes very insecure, anxious and worried about her children. She might project the insecurities from her past onto her children. In even more extreme cases, some women may not feel safe leaving their children alone in the company of the children's father; they may be afraid that if their children leave their care, that the children might also be sexually abused. But in reality, children need some individual space and the freedom to grow. When the mothers are overprotective, their parent-child relations will be problematic.
TT: What does the Dandelion Center do for these women?
Wang: Usually, women contact us years after the trauma has taken place. However, the source of their problems is the sexual abuse in their childhood. So, we focus on reconstructing their childhood experiences. When they were children, they were vulnerable and helpless. While that sense of powerlessness may persist until the present day, the truth is that they have matured since then and are now adults. Now that it is years after the abuse, they have the ability to protect themselves. When a woman enters counseling, we take her back to that period of her life and help her realize that she is now no longer that helpless, powerless child, that she is now a capable adult.
In this field we talk a lot about the "inner child." These women we come in contact with are 30, 40 years old. But during the counseling process, we can see that some part of these women stands still at that time she was victimized, when she was five or six. So when other people abuse her, she feels that she has no way to fight back.
For example, I saw once where in our counseling, the leader of the therapy group placed a pillow on a woman's chest, and told her that the pillow represented an aggressor, her abuser. When the leader told the woman to push off the pillow, the woman began crying and kept on saying, "I can't do it, I can't do it."
In our counseling, we tell these women, you are not 5 or 6 years old anymore. With your current height, weight, and physical power, you have the strength to push this abuser aside. We work to empower these women's inner children and allow them to grow up.
Our therapy for these women involves many different techniques, such as play counseling and playacting. Since these women's experiences of abuse happened in childhood, and children are not used to using words to express themselves, we find it helpful to use nonverbal methods to help them explore that period of their lives.
The counseling process takes from about half a year to two years. Often, these women's experiences also produce other problems, such as depression and other mental disorders. So we also end up working closely with hospitals and other agencies to help these women, but there's only so much we can do as an individual agency.
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