In the winter of 2010, less than two weeks before Christmas, dozens of parents in Amsterdam received terrible news. Police in the US had tipped off Dutch authorities that a young male childcare worker had sexually abused tens of young, preverbal children in his care, mostly boys under the age of two. The man confessed to numerous instances of abuse. The courts went on to convict him. And the parents of the children abused had to decide what to do next.
As they grappled with the abuse of their child, the parents faced a difficult dilemma: If their child showed no signs of being traumatised by or even remembering the abuse, should they tell them? And how?
It was a decision that researchers in the Netherlands tracked in a unique long-term study, posing questions now likely being asked by potentially thousands of parents in Australia, after allegations of serial abuse in childcare settings.
“That’s the big question. ‘Now that I know, what do I do?’” says Hetty Johnson, the founder of Bravehearts, an Australian child protection organisation. “How do you rescue the child?”
The burden of that decision is huge, says Johnson,
“Parents are not equipped [to handle that]… If the child is non-verbal it’s even more difficult because then you’re left in a situation where you’re thinking ‘Well, am I going to give them too much information or not enough? How do I deliver that information? What are the words I use?
“Do I even need to tell them or will they just forget about it?’”
What a baby remembers
Few people can remember anything before the age of three or four, by which stage most children gain language fluency. The period until that point is regularly called “infantile amnesia”.
Additionally, there has historically been a belief that very young children feel pain less or feel it differently. Until the early 1980s it was routine for surgeries to be performed on babies without anaesthetic. This pair of assumptions led to what researchers now identify as a misconception that children may not be traumatised by events early in their lives.
“It is difficult to scientifically demonstrate whether children remember abuse that happens in pre-verbal years but we do know children develop some forms of early implicit memories from birth or even before,” says Divna Haslam, a child psychologist and associate professor at the University of Queensland.
“These memories are less about specific events and more about feelings and experiences and often fade with time. Episodic memory [the ability to remember specific events] typically develops around age four. This means while early abuse can impact children they may not vividly remember specific occurrences of very early abuse particularly over time.”
Research into the impacts of early child abuse is limited. There has been an assumption that serious child sexual abuse does not happen often to children under the age of three, says Delanie Woodlock, deputy director of Childlight East Asia and Pacific at UNSW.
“It’s kind of a neglected area because these children can’t tell us about what’s happened,” she says. Research has found that online child sexual assault material featuring infants and toddlers is “not uncommon”.
“So contrary to what we have believed, and what we have dismissed in survivors, we now see so much evidence that this is occurring and has occurred for a long time,” says Woodlock.
The Amsterdam case
In the 15 years since the revelation of the abuse in Amsterdam, psychologists and researchers have been following a few dozen of the confirmed and strongly suspected victims and their families. It is a unique study in the under-researched field.
Parents in the study reported their children had not been subject to any other maltreatment outside the sexual abuse case. Three years after the abuse was revealed, researchers found that 39% of the child survivors were asymptomatic. However, 30% showed sexual behaviour problems – defined as “overstepping normative behaviour, indicating a possible link to the [child sexual abuse]” – and eight years into the study researchers reported rates of such behaviour were still “high”. At three years into the study a quarter had attachment insecurity (although it was not possible to compare this rate to a control group). At the eight year mark, researchers reported “low percentages of PTSD and dissociation in children at each time point” over the study, and that symptoms of “disassociation” appeared to reduce over time.
As for the parents, one in four demonstrated clinical PTSD symptoms at some point over eight years. Parents surveyed at the three year point reported feelings of guilt, shame and anger.
One of the core things the researchers tracked was when, how and why parents did or did not tell their children about their abuse history.
The decision to tell or not to tell was a significant source of worry for many parents, a 2024 paper by the researchers reported. Parents were cautious about the possible harm of keeping the abuse a secret and felt their child had a right to know, but were also worried about the impact that knowledge could have on their child. One told researchers: “Why should I do this to her? To ruin her life?… It is my worry, my problem”, citing a concern that the information would “damage my own daughter again”.
Over 10 years, 41 parents took part in interviews. At the 10-year mark more than two-thirds had chosen to tell their child.
The researchers found that most parents said the child had no memory of the event. After they were told, many children were quiet or had questions. One child experienced PTSD after the disclosure, another asked why he had been told as he did not want to know.
“None of the parents regretted disclosing,” the study found.
“There is no strong evidence that disclosure is harmful,” the researchers concluded. However, they also found no evidence that children found out later and were angry at their parents for withholding the information, “suggesting that not disclosing is not necessarily harmful either. However, most parents seem to experience ongoing moral dilemmas with non-disclosure while disclosing provided relief for most parents.”
‘You can heal, you can recover’
Haslam is keen to stress that while for some children, particularly those for whom it was repeated or severe, sexual abuse in early childhood may prompt difficulties later in life, “this is not the case for all children”.
Woodlock says families need to understand where certain behaviours in children might be coming from. But moving forward requires a balanced outlook. “It is a significant and sometimes catastrophic event in a child’s life,” she says. “But you can heal, you can recover.”
Bravehearts’ Johnson says it is a mistake not to tell children of abuse in their history, not least because the child may have some form of memory retained or the trauma may manifest in different behaviour, feelings, aversions or fears. A child has the right to know what is in their past, she says, and withholding this kind of information can lead to conflict in the relationship if it is found out later. She says some parents hesitate to tell their child of past abuse for fear being labelled a “victim” will draw sex offenders towards that child in future.
“The fact that the child has been a victim of crime is not the thing that gravitates sex offenders to that child,” she says. “It’s the disempowerment of a child. So when a child is sexually assaulted at whatever age, that takes some of their power away, their agency, their right to say no.”
In her experience, telling a child can recover some of that power and reinforce that their parents intervened to protect the child as soon as the abuse was discovered.
“Silence, secrecy, shame is not the solution to anything. That is the sex offender’s very best friend and our children’s very worst enemy.”
Disclosing abuse for parents in the Amsterdam study was a gradual process, rather than a singular event. “Full disclosure will likely occur over a period of time with more information being provided as the child develops the emotional maturity to understand and discuss the topic, or even ask their own questions,” Haslam says.
It is important, she says, to reinforce that the child is not at fault and follow the child’s lead. It may be that a conversation is very short, but it is key to keep the door open for further discussion.
Importantly, Haslam says, parents should have processed their own emotions – potentially with psychological support – in advance, in order to be a calm and reassuring guide to their child. “It may also be appropriate to wait if the motivation to disclose is driven more by the parents’ needs than the child’s best interests,” she says.
“Don’t make it a big deal,” says Johnson. “If it’s a big deal for you, don’t say it because the idea is to take away that fear and all that anxiety” and to replace it with reassurance and security.
For Woodlock, recovery is something that happens in families and also something that needs to play out on a larger scale.
“This happens on all of our watch,” she says. “It’s not inevitable, particularly in institutional care. This is 100% preventable.
“I think that [preventing it happening again is] something we owe them, and we should be working towards that as a community. So it’s not just left up to parents.”
• In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800; adult survivors can seek help at Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helpline International
