Facing Up to Sex Abuse

By Ezra Bowen

Prevention programs proliferate in classrooms across the U.S.

It is an autumn morning at Fairview Elementary School in Logansport, Ind., and the pupils are really into the show. A troupe of actors in snaggy bear costumes and moose outfits frolics through a wilderness of papier-mache rocks and trees painted on screens, while a chorus of owls and frogs makes deep-woods sounds. The two moose shamble off and ... Wait a second. Big Bear has made a grab for Little Bear. Now Big Bear comes on heavy with a lingering hug that bothers Little Bear, who squirms away. The kids in the audience whisper, "Hide! Hide!" But Big Bear finds Little Bear, and this time Big Bear plants a large paw on Little Bear's crotch. Big Bear threatens to spank Little Bear if Little Bear tells. But in wanders Big Moose, who advises Little Bear to tell a grownup--like a teacher--then goes off to confront Big Bear.

In a skit at the Douglas Elementary School in Columbus, a character named Uncle Harry, played by an adult leader, grosses out the second grade by putting some Big-Bearish moves on his seven-year-old niece Sally, with whom he is baby-sitting in front of the TV on Saturday morning.

Uncle Harry pulls her close, pats her knee and offers to buy her a Michael Jackson T shirt if she will come across with "one of those kisses I like."

Sally, a rehearsed volunteer from the class, is way ahead of Uncle Harry. "I think I hear Aunt Mary coming home," she says. When he tries to make her promise that what has happened is "just our little secret," she replies firmly, "No, I'm going to tell Mom and Aunt Mary." That shuts down Uncle Harry. When the leader asks the class if Sally wanted to sit close, they chorus, "No! Did he force her? "Yes!" Did she want to kiss Uncle Harry? "No!"

The audience at the Bridger Elementary School in Portland, Ore., is even tougher when a friendly man in a nice suit latches on to a little boy and growls, "I gotcha!" The roomful of first-graders turns thumbs down, but not on the villain. They think the boy has made himself too easy a mark. He gets higher grades in a rerun by standing back and shouting, "Let me alone!" as the man, played by Teacher Jon Merritt, tries to lure him into a make-believe car.

These sketches, with their explosive message and rapt audience involvement, are part of a drama unfolding in classrooms all across the country. Impelled by a rising national concern over child sex abuse, thousands of schools have taken up the touchy business of telling kids what it is all about and how to confront it. More than 50,000 children in Ohio and 80,000 in California have watched or played in the Uncle Harry show. The State of California, shocked by the arraignment of seven people from the McMartin School in Manhattan Beach on 208 counts of child molesting, has just passed an $11.25 million bill to expand sex-abuse programs in public schools.

Over the past year Maryland's Montgomery County has enlisted 38 schools in an antiabuse curriculum of classroom talk about the body and different kinds of touching, including a spooky film vignette of a boy lying in bed crying as a man's voice says not to tell or the man will go to jail. In Cook County, Ill., the sheriffs department has presented a three-day abuse-prevention program to as many as 8,000 youngsters and is booked solid by area schools through 1986. In Minnesota and Wisconsin, the professional Illusion Theater Co. has reached more than half a million children with live and televised shows at both the grade school and high school levels. Illusion's high school pre sentation carries some raw stuff, including a chilling family meeting in which a daughter admits, "I've been having sex with my dad since I was a little girl."

Though the details and intensity vary, the theme of most of the programs is the same. As Betty Takahashi, Montgomery County coordinator of health education, explains to Grades 4 and 5, "Each person's body is his or her own. They have a right not to be touched if they don't want to be."

There are good touches, such as a relative's loving hug or a baby-sitter's 3 tickle. "But if it doesn't stop or makes you feel uncomfortable," she says, "it's a bad touch," the kind that can give you that "uh-oh feeling." When that happens, she goes on, "trust your feelings. Say 'I don't want to,' and get away as fast as you can. Then keep telling your story until you are believed."

Until a few years ago, barely a school would touch the loaded subject of sex abuse, let alone make it part of the curriculum. It seemed none of the schools' business. Furthermore, molested youngsters rarely told, either cowed by a stranger's threat or, if the offender was some one close, shamed by the act or fearful of a family blowup. Besides, most grownups tended to brush off chil dren's tales of abuse as fantastic.

Among the first to speak out strongly in the classroom was Uncle Harry, who came to life in 1978 in a model program titled the Child Assault Prevention Project (CAP); it was Iput together by a fledgling group on shoestring grants for schools in Columbus after a local second-grader was raped. The heart of the CAP program, and others that have followed or paralleled it, is a series of playlets | designed so that children and leaders can handle the roles and then talk out the tricky nuances of abuse. For the youngest children, rag dolls are used as stand-ins to show the body areas that are strictly private.

With the script, CAP workers provide a two-hour introduction for parents, with some straight facts on sex abuse and suggested ways of encouraging their children to tell about any thing off-color that may have happened with an adult. "An offender will scare a kid," says a CAP worker, and "tell him his parents won't love him any more. So you have to defuse that strategy ahead of time."

The introduction also tends to defuse parental objections to dealing with the subject at all. At an early CAP session, a Stop CAP committee showed up, but, says one of the instructors, "by the time the program was over, the audience gave us a standing ovation." Not all parents are so receptive. In Prince William County, Va., one group attempted to hold up the showing of an antiabuse musical because they feared the material would be too explicit for grade school.

Another key ingredient is teacher preparation. "A lot of teachers are nervous and unsure on the subject," says Joan Danzansky, executive director of the Washington, D.C., chapter of the National Committee for Prevention of Child Abuse (NCPCA). Small wonder when so many offenders are family members and all states have laws to fine or jail a teacher for failing to report an offense. To help teachers, the National Education Association has prepared a $137 kit that includes film strips, a book and handouts. Twelve hundred kits have gone out to master teachers who, over the next few years, will educate teachers all over the country.

Even Hollywood and comic-book publishers are getting into the act. In September Paramount Home Video released a videotape titled Strong Kids, Safe Kids, starring Henry ("the Fonz") Winkler as host for an antiabuse talk show, with fast cuts to celebrities such as Mariette Hartley and the Smurfs, who hammer home the show's core message: "No! Go! Tell!"

Copies have been sent to the Montreal school board. Last week Marvel Comics completed a print run of a million copies of a Spider-Man special issue, which will be distributed on order by NCPCA. In the issue, the superhero rescues a molested boy from a lecherous baby sitter and reveals that even he, Spider-Man, as a youngster had been abused by an older friend.

Amid the whirl of activity are signs that these programs are beginning to work, that children are learning to stand their ground, to tell, and that teachers and parents are feeling more at ease with the subject. Last year Montgomery County investigated 148 reported incidents of sex abuse, four times the number in 1979. In California, child sex-offense reports were up by more than 4,000 since the programs first began, an increase of 44%. Though not all such revelations can be credited to the antiabuse curriculums, a fair number clearly come from what is being learned in school, as one St. Paul nursery-school toddler demonstrated last week. Taken by his mother for a routine physical, he at first refused the doctor's genital examination, reminding his mother that nobody could touch his private parts. When she reassured him, the exam proceeded. --By Ezra Bowen. Reported by Deborah Kaplan/Los Angeles and Valerie Mindel/Chicago

With reporting by Deborah Kaplan/Los Angeles, Valerie Mindel/Chicago