An increasing number of Catholic parents are alarmed by the decision of the Metro (Toronto) Separate School Board (MSSB) to make a child sexual abuse awareness and prevention program compulsory in all of its elementary schools.

Almost thirty parents—many of them couples—attended a meeting September 13 at St. Theresa’s Catholic Church in Scarborough, Ontario to hear Women for Faith and Family president Cornelia Ferreira speak on the hidden dangers of the MSSBs Preventive Education Program (PEP).

Cornelia Ferreira

Mother of four and well read in the history and goals of the program, Ferreira had been invited to speak at St. Theresa’s by the president of the Ontario Association of Catholic Families, Brian Taylor, and by pastor, Fr. Ambrose Sheehy.

Four women who have played crucial roles in the creation and implementation of he Preventive Education Program were on hand to accuse Ferreira of negativism, outrageous charges and inventing her criticisms. They were Carole Devine, a Scarborough based school trustee; Teresa Ravanello, chief social worker at the MSSB; Sylvia Pivko, Executive Director of the Metro Toronto Special Committee on Child Abuse and Gail Gould, Coordinator of the Preventative Education Program.

After Ferreira’s talk, angry parents focused their questions and remarks on the apparent abuse of the right to educate their children as they saw fit. One parent asked why a Catholic school board was teaching her kids this nonsense. Another objected to the inclusion of abuse prevention within a course of sex education.

A mother complained that she did not know the PEP had been implemented in her local elementary school until one of her daughters  had been adversely affected by it. Trustee Devine responded to her distress by saying that notices of informational meetings always go home, but that many parents fail to show up.

Since the September 13 meeting, a number of other parents—asking to remain anonymous—have told The Interim about hw the Preventive Education Program resulted in damage to family relationships.

A Willowdale, Ontario mother was at first uncritical of the program. But later she recalls, “When I thought it over, I asked myself, where was the Christian application in this teaching?” She approached the school principal who said that it was the classroom teacher’s responsibility to supply the Christian context.

The matter might have ended there, except that after her daughter had proceeded through the program, she approached her teacher with a report of sexual abuse. Only after Children’s Aid officials were called in did anguished family members learn the truth. Despite the fact that the program asks teachers to underline how serious a false charge of “unwanted sexual touch” is, the child fabricated the story. She saw a school sanctioned opportunity to threaten her estranged father and she took it, her mother states.

During the 1988-89 school year, a Toronto mother told The Interim, her kindergarten-age daughter adopted a scolding, provocative tone toward her. “My daughter was saying things like “I don’t love you, you’re mean to me, why do you always have to be like that to me, who do you think you are.” She thought her daughter was simply passing through a normal if trying phase of childhood until the day she came home and declared that a boy in her older sisters class (grade 8) had exposed himself to her.

After patient inquiry, during which the mother repeatedly promised full support if the story was true, the child admitted she had lied. A legal and emotional disaster averted, the mother pushed on to find out why her daughter had concocted such a story. She finally related that in the context of the Preventive Education Program, the teacher told the children, “no matter what you say to the older person, they’re supposed to believe you.”

Carole Devine

School trustee Carole Devine prefers to disregard the mounting anecdotal evidence that programs like the PEP can injure the psychological health of their pupils: “I stand behind it. I have not seen any evidence that this program per se is causing psychological damage,” she maintains.

A St. Theresa’s parishioner, Devine had demanded to know from Fr. Sheehy before the September 13 meeting why he had given permission to the Ontario Association of Catholic Families to promote views she believed were unsound, and pernicious. In the course of the meeting, and later, in her remarks to The Interim, Devine assailed the good sense of those who have serious misgivings about the program.

“I have a great deal of trouble dealing with some of the information coming to us as a board at the same time and from the same voices who are attacking this program in many irrational ways,” she said.

In particular, she branded as nonsense Ferreira’s claim that asking children to imagine in the context of a classroom lesson on abuse prevention is “training them for the occult.”

Guided fantasies

The authors of the program include a number of guided fantasies among the teaching ideas. Although these are apparently optional, they come with the strong recommendation that “a guided fantasy or image has been demonstrated to be an effective tool in a variety of learning situations.”

A guided fantasy follows an unvarying formula. Before she begins the fantasy, the teacher prepares the students with relaxation and breathing exercises. To set the mood, darkening the room, playing soothing music and lighting a candle are suggested. Then the teacher leads the students through the fantasy. When the fantasy is over, she gradually leads the children out of their altered state by more breathing exercises and a count of ten.

The quasi-supernatural character of the guided fantasy is not accidental. The authors of the Preventive Education Program have uncritically adopted various relaxation, visualization and trance induction exercises practiced by the adherents of the new age and modern witchcraft religions.

For example, in her 1979 book, The Spiral Dance, Witch Starhawk, an associate of Fr. Matthew Fox and a devotee of the new Creation spirituality describe a number of trance induction exercises. With few differences these constitute the basis for the PEP’s formula for guided fantasies. Occult feminist Gena Glicklich writes in the Winter 1987 issue of Women of Power, “In order to make a decision I have a Guided Imagery and Music session … The session puts me in touch with my spirit guides.”

What is the problem with this? Inducing an entranced state in impressionable, easily manipulated children is far removed from “asking them to imagine.” The vast majority of parents with children in Toronto’s Catholic Schools of course have no idea of the psychological risk inherent in such exercise.

Fr. Tom Day

Supporters of the Preventive Education Program such as new trustee and pastor of St. Paul’s Church in Toronto, Fr. Tom Day say that silence from parents implies approval. Trustee Owen O’Reilly, however, offers a more plausible explanation:

“I honestly feel that most parents think that because their children are in a Catholic school, there’s nothing to fear. That’s not always true.”

Despite the fact that parental and professional alarm over the imposition of the PEP is increasing, the MSSB assumes that most people like it, O’Reilly maintains. The parents who voice their concerns are labeled as “cranks and troublemakers.” “They are treated very shabbily some of the trustees and staff…I feel we have virtually locked out the parents from our system.”

When reached by The Interim, Fr. Day refused to comment on either the alienation of some parents or on the purported flaws of the Preventive Education Program.

Teresa Ravanello

Chief social worker at the MSSB, Teresa Ravanello also attended the September 13 meeting. An original member of the Special Committee on Child abuse when it was created by Metro Toronto in 1981, Ravanello was ideally placed to successfully lobby for implementation of the PEP in the Catholic board.

Ravanello is still a keen supporter of the program. For example, when asked if she thought the PEP’s definition of sexual abuse as a feeling of unwanted touch was adequate, she optimally replied that its defects would be corrected by the Catholic teacher in the Catholic School.

A naïve view, says trustee Harold Adams. “It’s not enough to say that all we have to do is Catholicize the program. That means, if we take this program from [the Special Committee on Child Abuse] and we baptize it, it will become officially Catholic. Well; it doesn’t work that way. Its origin was not in the Catholic faith.”

Touching

Ferreira argues that a feeling of unwanted touch is the PEP’s sole definition of sexual abuse. But if touch is the standard, then the reverse must be acceptable too. Sexual pleasure is a feeling of wanted touch. The program’s authors themselves admit the confusion when they write in the Guidelines to the Resource Materials: “Its fine if touch that hurts (e.g.) hitting, punching, etc.) is called bad, but from the point of view of healthy sexual development, labeling sexual touch as ‘bad’ is undesirable, particularly since from the point of view of the abused child, the sexual touch may feel ‘good.’”

There is a further point. This directly conflicts with the Christian teaching that sexual touching outside of marriage is wrong, Ferreira asserts. Transplanting the Preventive Education Program to Catholic Schools will not change the program in any fundamental way. Through plays, puppets and study cards, it will continue to impart the idea that sexual abuse is what the child feels it is.

Another Christian educator is frightened by what he perceives to be an epidemic of child sexual abuse. But he also seems oddly willing to favor grave intrusions on normal family relationships.

Ary De Moor, Edmonton curriculum director of Christian Schools International, defends his recently completed “Family Life” program. He claims that it places controversial training in abuse prevention in a Christian moral context.

But in response to the evidence that abuse prevention is liable to wreak emotional havoc on otherwise healthy families, De Moor echoes the reasons used by the defenders—Christian or otherwise—of such programs.

If innocent adults end up in court as a result of some childish confusion, “that is the price we have to pay, I’d rather have it that way than have some child suffer for years without saying anything,” he said. What about the right of parents to pull their children from the abuse education program—a right Toronto’s Catholic board grants? De Moor believes it’s an “absurd notion.”

Dismayed by frightening but contradictory statistics, well-meaning educators continue to prescribe cures for the sexual abuse of children without knowing whether they are effective or harmful. It is as if the Canadian government released an unknown drug on the market, and only after people had died from the side effects decided to test it, says W. Alan Garneau, a former B.C. principal. He now urges a moratorium on abuse prevention programs. Yet with the Preventive Education Program compulsory for thousands of children in the MSSB’s 192 elementary schools, Teresa Ravenello told The Interim her department has no plans to evaluate its effectiveness.

Evaluation needed

Prof. Ian Gentles of York University and Child Psychologist Elizabeth Cassidy say that rigorous evaluation of such programs is long overdue. They are the authors of the March 1988 Evaluating the Evaluators: Child Sexual Abuse Prevention—Do We Know It Works? This study was commissioned by the Toronto based Human Life Research Institute (HLRI) and funded by Health and Welfare Canada to study over 140 titles in the evaluation literature since 1980. Gentles and Cassidy conclude that “there is now a compelling need for an evaluative component in every program.”

The vast majority of abuse prevention programs—the MSSB’s included—concentrate on sexuality and are addressed to children under 10. But, as noted, virtually no well-controlled evaluations have been done. Gentles and Cassidy offer three reasons for this: Program goals are ambiguous.

For example, the creators of the PEP clearly regard disclosures of sexual abuse a central goal of the program, (though the MSSB’s Ravanello vehemently disputes this.)

In 1986 the Metro Toronto Special Committee on Child Abuse reported that of the 17, 182 children who were exposed to their program, 13 (0.08%) came forward with stories of sexual abuse. If disclosures of the “widespread sexual abuse of children” (PEPs Resource Materials Guide) is a central goal of the program, then this negligible occurrence rate is a strong argument for the re-evaluation of the program.

Tests for measuring outcome are not reliable. Though abuse prevention programs have been institutionalized for the past decade, no researcher has devised a test to determine if they have taught what they said they would. When they need to, children—especially younger ones—may not be able to put the knowledge they have acquired into action. More seriously, training children to shoulder burden of defending themselves or “blowing the whistle” on sexual offenders may have the negative result of fear, distrust and loss of innocence. (Garneau)

Sex abuse is a complex phenomenon throughout the middle part of this century, parents (with the help of local jurisdictions) were primarily responsible for the safety education of their children. However, in the 1980s schools began to assume this responsibility. They broadened it beyond all recognition. No longer was safety sufficient.

Planned Parenthood coined the rallying slogan “Children can handle receiving information if adults can handle giving it.” With this kind of guidance, abuse prevention has become little more than another sex ed program for a quarter of a million Canadian children.

However, the question is precisely whether children are able to handle the complex phenomenon of sex abuse. “Any attempt to teach protection,” say Gentles and Cassidy, “is restricted by limitations of the children’s own cognitive development, learning capacity, style and level of assimilation.”

A recent study by Neil Gilbert, professor of social welfare at the University of California Berkeley confirms this. After two years of evaluating seven major sexual abuse prevention programs, Gilbert finds that children may come to misunderstand or reject perfectly healthy affection. Leaving children to appraise an ordinary parental touch on the basis of whether it feels good or bad is dangerous nonsense, he notes.

Educator now rejects own idea

More than two years ago the American psychotherapist who the authors of the MSSB program thank for her “advice and inspiration” confessed that she wished she had never thought of the “good touch/bad touch” concept. “It oversimplifies [sexual abuse] and makes it an easy answer to give kids,” Cordelia Kent/Anderson acknowledged at a June 1987 conference in Toronto. “The majority of touch…is neither good nor bad—and confusing,” she admitted.

Out of his professional experience Dr. Murray McGovern corroborates Kent/Anderson’s current thinking. McGovern is a pediatrician and psychiatrist with a flourishing practice in Oakville, Ontario. “To teach a child a pre-conceptual stage of psycho-moral development about sexual abuse is to feed into a very simplistic, black and white understanding,” he said.

McGovern told The Interim he is seeing a “horrendous” problem of intimidation of parents. Discipline becomes impossible when children know they can set their rights against the authority of the home, he stated.

“I’ve seen youngsters from a separate school at a very early grade who were indoctrinated with the idea that the most likely sexual abuser is the opposite sex parent in the family-a father, an uncle or a grandfather.” This may be true. Cordelia Kent/Anderson and many others argue with some validity that the person who eventually breaks down resistance to sexual advances is someone the child knows well. But Dr. McGovern believes that this tragic—though relatively uncommon—fact of family life has been put to the service of a feminist, anti-male philosophy. “The framers of the [Preventive Education Program] are consciously or unconsciously committed to destroying the third commandment—“Honour your father and mother’—by the examples of the few who do abuse.”

Dr. Michael Barry, chief of psychiatry at the Etobicoke General Hospital in Toronto thoroughly reviewed the PEP when it was first piloted in selected Metro Toronto schools in 1983. He has seen it uncritically accepted in both the Catholic and public boards since then. He is also alarmed about abuse—the abuse of parental rights.

“It is very destructive to the unity of the family,” he told The Interim. “It builds in at an early level a genuine mistrust by children for parents and they have an alternate authority to which they can go,” Barry asserted.

As sexual abuse awareness and prevention programs proliferate across North America, the number of false accusations are rising. B.C.’s newly founded Society for Educational Excellence (SEE) can already document scores of such cases, including one of a father actually arrested on the strength of a childish misinterpretation. He plans to sue the school board. The longer the Metro Separate School Board waits the closer comes their day in court.