Childhood Sexual Abuse Can Cause Lasting Damage

The case of Christa Pike, now back in prison after surviving a botched execution for the murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer 30 years ago, raises so many difficult and disturbing questions. Pike was the first woman in the state of Tennessee in 200 years to receive the death sentence.

Beneath all of these events lie the traumatic facts of Pike’s early years. I had interviewed people who had committed violent crimes as teens for my book, Before Their Crimes: What We’re Misunderstanding about Child Trauma, Youth Crime, and the Path to Healing, which made me think about a more specific aspect of the life she had before her crime: sexual abuse that began when she was age 2 and repeated throughout her childhood, up to age 17.

Pike’s seizures during infancy revealed that she had sustained brain damage due to her mother’s alcohol abuse during pregnancy. She was diagnosed with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, FASD, which describes a range of neurodevelopmental deficits that can result from prenatal alcohol exposure. This can affect physical, cognitive, social-emotional, and behavioral functioning. Involvement in the criminal justice system is known to be a significant adverse outcome for many people with FASD (Pei, Flannigan, Keller and colleagues, 2018).

Pike was sexually abused more than once at the age of 2 by a boyfriend of her grandmother. It is impossible to imagine this kind of assault by an adult on a toddler or to fully grasp the catastrophic effect on the developing brain and body of a small child. In Pike’s case, the early sexual assaults and those inflicted on her by other perpetrators at ages 11, 13, and 17 did further harm to a brain already weakened by damage in utero.

Threat Detection and Behavior

Researchers have found that children who have experienced sexual abuse, when compared to their peers who have not been abused, have structural abnormalities in threat detection and response, causing them to be hypervigilant and impulsive, predisposing them to future behavioral problems. These changes may help them adapt to a negative environment in the short term but can lead to future externalization or other psychiatric problems (Demir, Kaya, Ozalay and colleagues, 2023).

The childhoods of many abused children, including Pike, do not include protective, caring adults who are present to prevent further trauma or to help them heal from what has happened to them. Abused children rarely experience safe, loving relationships—ones that reassure them they are valued and worthy.

When their easily triggered sense of danger is aroused, they have few tools to calm themselves or feel safe—even when their alarm system goes off in situations that do not pose a threat. At the same time, they are often repeatedly victimized as a result of their dysregulated stress response; they fail to identify people who may be dangerous.

It isn’t only the brain and body of a sexually abused child that is harmed. The developing sense of self—who I am, what I can expect from others, how they will see and treat me—cannot escape being used as an object by an adult, especially when that adult is a trusted member of the child’s life.

Early Trauma and Aggressive Reactions

In the time since Pike committed her crime, scientific knowledge about brain development and the impact of trauma early in life has exploded. We know that the brain's executive functions—decision-making, judgment, ability to weigh future consequences of our actions—do not fully develop until the late 20s.

We also know that early-occurring stress that is severe or chronic can be said to be “built into our bodies” because it leaves marks on our neurological and psychological stress response systems (Shonkoff and Garner 2012, p. 237). This can lead to highly aggressive reactions in high-pressure moments, especially in the presence of peers.

Advances in scientific knowledge have changed sentencing laws for juvenile offenders. The Supreme Court completely banned the death penalty for people under 18 in 2005, 10 years after Pike’s sentencing, and 28 states have banned juvenile life without parole. In many states, the youth and early circumstances of juvenile offenders, especially their exposures to trauma and maltreatment, are taken into consideration during sentencing.

Pike would likely have received a different sentence had her crime occurred today. At the same time, though we know so much more now than we did then, the great majority of us still have difficulty understanding the harmful nature of child sexual abuse. We need look no further than the example of the Epstein survivors.

In the words of Zeanah and Humphreys, “There may be no single greater environmental predictor of mental health difficulties than experiences of maltreatment.” (2019, p. 3.)

References