Uncovering Hidden Child Sexual Abuse
By Ruth Reymundo Mandel, Chief Business Development Officer and Credible Expert, Safe & Together Institute
Here is a hard truth: Child sexual abuse doesn’t often look like sex. If we only flag sexual abuse when it resembles adult intercourse, we are going to miss most of it. And what we miss, perpetrators continue to perpetrate and exploit.
Much of child sexual abuse is intentionally veiled, shrouded in adult authority, care, and professional roles and power dynamics, and disguised as medical care, discipline, jokes, play, or affection. These acts often involve sexualized violence to a child’s genitals or developing body under the false pretense of play, hygiene, or parenting. Some perpetrators hit, harm, or observe a child’s genitalia to ingratiate themselves, feel dominant, or inflict humiliation and fear—not because they “confuse” sex with care but because their sense of power and their sexual arousal is bound to cruelty and control.
These are not grey areas. These are acts of sexualized body torture. When professionals don’t name them, recognize them, or act on them, we allow perpetrators to operate in plain sight—often supported in their authority over children who they continue to abuse. We allow disclosures to be shut down or punished. We fail to protect children.
Too often, child sexual abuse is framed as something that will be obvious when it happens. But here’s what it actually looks like:
A camp counselor who invents “games” involving nudity, blindfolds, or touching, insisting it’s part of tradition or bonding, while ignoring children’s consent or discomfort.
A parent or caregiver who forces a child to watch pornography or sexualized content, then uses it as a “teaching moment” or to quiz the child about arousal or preferences.
A school staff member who regularly isolates a specific child under the guise of “mentorship,” then touches them under their clothing during “tickle fights” or back rubs.
A therapist who repeatedly asks sexually intrusive questions unrelated to the presenting issue, while normalising discomfort as “part of the therapeutic process.”
A coach who makes girls demonstrate stretches, squats, or “body form” in front of peers or adults while commenting on their bodies, often under the pretext of fitness or performance.
A family member who repeatedly walks in on a child while bathing, dressing, or using the toilet, despite age, expressed discomfort, or previous boundary-setting.
A foster parent who restricts clothing, withholds sanitary products, or interrogates about sexual feelings to control how a child manages their developing body, often framing it as teaching discipline or hygiene.
A detention center staffer who films children changing clothes, showering, or engaging in sexual acts under the pretext of monitoring for safety or “evidence” then uses it to coerce, shame, and abuse them.
A religious figure who insists on “laying hands” or “disciplining” children’s bodies, including genital areas, as part of healing or spiritual purification.
A parent who forces a child to “confess” to sexual thoughts or behaviors then uses the information to shame, humiliate, sexually abuse, or coerce the child.
A caregiver who manipulates and grooms younger children into naked dares or exploratory sexualized play, then threatens punishment, harm, and exposure if they talk about it.
A clinician who repeatedly re-orders unnecessary intimate exams or “medical procedures”—despite a child’s age/developmental level or a lack of clinical justification—to cause physical harm, control, and sexual trauma.
These aren’t outliers or extremes—they reflect real patterns of sexualized control, grooming, humiliation, rape and abuse, often minimized or missed because they fall outside the narrow frame of what many still think sexual abuse “should” look like. And we need to get better at seeing them, naming them, and documenting them clearly.
So how do we do this better? How do we create the conditions for professionals to recognize child sexual abuse and children to disclose and be protected? We partner.
Partnering is not passive listening. It is an active, skilled practice rooted in trust, context, and safety. The Safe & Together Model gives us clear guidance for how to partner with both children and their protective parents—even in cases where the abuse is veiled and professionals and the system are conditioned to look away.
5 Key Partnering Strategies for Identifying and Responding to Hidden Child Sexual Abuse
1. Start with Curiosity, Not Judgment
Many protective parents have seen red flags, but their efforts to seek help have been dismissed or they’ve been punished for trying to protect their child or accused of leading them to disclose information the perpetrator denies. Instead of asking, “Why didn’t you act sooner?”, start by asking:
“What were you seeing that made you uncomfortable?”
“What made you worry this wasn’t right?”
“Who did you tell, and what happened when you did?”
This approach validates the parent’s protective instincts and creates a foundation for safety-based collaboration. It also gives the practitioner awareness as to their pattern of protective parenting given the perpetrator’s pattern of lies, denial, and hiding their perpetration.
2. Treat Children’s Partial Disclosures as Brave and Valid
Veiled abuse rarely begins with a full disclosure. A child might say, “He made me feel weird,” “She always wants to look at me down there,” or “My stomach hurts, I don't want to see...” These are entry points, not dead ends. So you can respond with: “Thank you for telling me. You don’t have to have all the words right now. I believe you.”
Partnering with children means responding with curiosity, calm, belief, and validation—not pressuring them to match adult ideas of what abuse “should” sound like.
Too often, our systems are built on the dangerous and untrue belief that children lie, while violent men—many with clear patterns of coercion, criminality, violence, and abuse—deserve the benefit of the doubt. This reversal of credibility doesn’t just silence children—it protects perpetrators.
Research shows that fewer than 1.5% of child sexual abuse disclosures are found to be intentionally false. Yet the myth that children lie or exaggerate about abuse persists—not just among the general public but within caregiving systems, legal, and professional practice.
Recantation occurs in approximately 23% of cases, but it does not mean the original disclosure was false. In fact, children are more likely to recant when they are unsupported, disbelieved, or remain in contact with the offending parent. Pressure from family members, fear of consequences, and lack of adult advocacy all contribute to withdrawal of disclosures—not fabrication.
Alarmingly, mothers who raise concerns about child sexual abuse during custody litigation are more likely to lose access to their children than to see their concerns validated—a phenomenon documented in a review of family court outcomes across the United States.
3. Map the Perpetrator’s Pattern of Behavior
Don’t treat each act in isolation. Veiled abuse is often part of a broader strategy of sexual control and grooming. Use Safe & Together’s pattern-based lens to ask:
What access did the adult have to the child’s body?
How were acts disguised—as discipline, faith, affection, medical care, play, hygiene, or cultural practices?
Were there prior grooming tactics or attempts to discredit the child or protective parent?
Does the perpetrator have a pattern of being accused of child sexual or adult sexual abuse?
Building this pattern helps us clearly name intent, risk, and harm—moving away from minimization and toward accountability.
4. Document the Protective Parent’s Actions and Barriers
Many survivors of domestic violence or coercive control take multiple protective steps long before professionals get involved. These can include:
Avoiding leaving children alone with the suspected perpetrator
Intervening physically or verbally to stop an act
Seeking support from family, teachers, or clinicians (and often being ignored or reported to child protection)
Seeking separation or divorce to minimize contact or to end contact
Partnering means making these actions visible and documented, not erasing them with failure-to-protect language.
5. Plan for Future Safety Without Re-Traumatising the Child or Punishing the Protective Parent
A trauma-informed and child-centered response doesn't just map patterns and disclosures—it also protects children from system-level harm. Safe partnering means:
Supporting protective parents with safety planning
Avoiding unnecessary exposure to the accused perpetrator during investigations
Helping survivors and children access legal, therapeutic, and community support without fear of backlash
Framing recommendations and documentation to minimize harm by other professionals and systems
Sexual Abuse Doesn’t Always Sound Like Disclosure: Recognizing Coded Disclosures
Professionals often expect children to name abuse clearly and directly. But many children can’t use adult language to describe sexual harm, especially when that harm is beyond their understanding of “sex,” confusing, disguised as something else, or linked to people they love and depend on. That doesn’t make the harm any less real. It means we need to listen better.
When children experience veiled sexual abuse—where acts are framed as “play,” “discipline,” “hygiene,” or “religious teaching”—their disclosures are often coded, emotional, or embedded in other behaviors. These are not false reports. They are trauma-coded disclosures that professionals should know how to recognize, hear, and explore.
Coded disclosures might sound like:
“I don’t like how he checks me. He says it’s for sports.”
“She makes me take off all my clothes even when I say no.”
“He always wants to play doctor, but only with me.”
“I’m the bad one. I make people do gross stuff.”
“He told me I’ll go to hell if I tell anyone what we prayed about.”
“I feel sick when I go to their house.”
"I don’t like the way they touch me."
“He always makes me hug and kiss him and sit on his lap.”
These disclosures often come with emotional cues, like:
Shame, embarrassment, or fear when discussing bodies or hygiene
Regression in behavior (e.g., bedwetting, thumb-sucking) after visits or events
Anger or aggression toward protective caregivers after returning from contact with the alleged perpetrator
Recanting, minimizing, or saying “just joking” immediately after sharing something serious
Physical symptoms without medical cause (e.g., stomachaches, sleep disturbance, genital pain)
Here’s what practitioners can do:
Don’t dismiss coded disclosures. Respond with calm, openness, and curiosity.
Record the child’s exact language—not your interpretation of it.
Use body-based, age-appropriate language if clarification is needed.
Avoid leading questions. Instead, offer space for elaboration.
Partner with protective parents to understand patterns, changes, and concerns over time.
Remember: A child saying “he checks me down there” is often disclosing all they can—especially when the abuse is being justified by an adult who has power over them as discipline, hygiene, or religious authority. When we listen for context, patterns, and impact—not just adult-style “facts”—we get closer to the truth children are trying to tell.
When systems fail to recognize these more veiled forms of sexual abuse and children’s coded disclosures, we fail children suffering sexual abuse. We blame protective parents for not knowing the unknowable. And we leave perpetrators untouched—still operating, still harming.
Survivors need practitioners who can recognize sexualized harm, control, and coded disclosures even when it doesn’t look like what they expect; who can recognize and name humiliation, dominance, violence, and invasive “care” when it is sexualized harm; and who are skilled in partnering with courage—with children, with protective parents, and with the truth of what child sexual abuse really looks like.
Additional Resources
Blog: Living in a Body Shaped by Violence: What Practitioners Need to Know About Identifying Child Abuse
Safe & Together Institute’s domestic abuse–informed trainings
Safe & Together Institute’s upcoming events
David Mandel’s book Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to Transform the Way We Keep Children Safe from Domestic Violence
