Revealing emotions

Sexually abused children use toys to show pain

 The small child will come into the room, wander around.

Maybe she'll check out the toys lining the shelves: a pirate ship, a farmhouse, wizard doll, stuffed white unicorn.

Maybe she'll look at the dollhouse that sits on the floor, or the box of play weapons or action figures.

The therapist will tell her this is her safe place, where nobody can hurt her and everything is hers to play with.

The little girl will pick up a baby doll and start feeding it a bottle.

Then she'll hear the therapist from the other side of the room: "You're picking up a doll. You're giving the doll a bottle."

The play, at this point, is superficial.

Eventually, it will become emotional, heavy. The young girl will tell the therapist who touched her and how it made her feel — through the toys.

The children Aimee Micetic counsels at Mutual Ground in Aurora range in age from 3 to 15. More girls than boys. More middle-school age than others. They act out — or suppress — their emotions in different ways but feel them all the same. And they show them in the only way they know how.

"(A child's) natural language is play," Micetic said, "so the toys are their world."

Startling numbers

A third of girls and one in five boys are sexually abused before age 18, according to the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault. But it's believed that the number of instances may be far greater because of a high number of unreported incidents.

Mutual Ground provided therapy to more than 140 children ages 1 to 17 last year, and half of them were ages 12 to 17, according to the agency's reports. Most of the children are from Aurora, Plano, Yorkville, Batavia and Oswego, said Linda Healy, the agency's executive director.

In Aurora, 40 cases of sexual abuse have been reported to police in the last 12 months. At least 19 of them were children, said Sgt. Marshall McQuinley, head of the department's Domestic Violence Reduction Unit.

"It happens so often and so frequently, and nobody wants to talk about it," Micetic said. "It's really a silent epidemic."

Need to feel protected

After the first couple sessions, the child will begin to test Micetic.

She might try to walk out of the room, throw a toy, or be overly touchy-feely with the counselor.

She wants to know how much the adult will put up with. She wants to know that this adult will keep her safe.

Micetic will tell her that throwing and misbehaving are not allowed in this room. That they can "high-5" or shake hands, but nothing more.

"They just need to make sure they're protected," Micetic said. "They want to see if I can handle what they're about to lay out on me."

And what they are about to lay out is always intense.

There comes a point, Micetic says, when the play is no longer just play.

The Dad doll will start hitting the Mom doll. The pirate ship captain will attack a shipman.

"You'll notice the room gets a lot more intense. There's a lot more feeling there. You just know," the therapist said. "It feels heavy. Emotionally heavy. You're feeling the sadness, you're feeling the helplessness, the grief, the anger, the guilt."

The play will start mirroring more and more what happened to them, although it's extremely rare that the child will act out anything sexual. It's always about someone taking over, power and control — the root of all that is behind sexual assault.

Micetic will interpret the metaphor. She'll say, "Dad is beating up on Mom. Dad must be real angry."

And the child might respond, "Yeah, he's mean."

Micetic never leaves the metaphor.

"I know the pirate is dad, but I'm not going to say that to the kid because they'll shut down," she said.

Some children will act out their emotions by showing the familial power-play.

"Sometimes the older children will act like babies," Micetic said. Others will take charge and tell the therapist how to care for them. "They'll say, 'You're the mom, I'm the kid, give me a bottle.'"

The play brings things out of the child of which the child might not have been aware, similar to how adults discover issues after talking about their emotions to a therapist, Micetic said.

The child is depending on Micetic to convey an understanding and provide emotional security.

"The child's in the driver's seat, and I'm in the back," Micetic said. "They're telling me, 'This is what I need to do to heal now.'"

'Burden of being abused'

At some point, the healing sets in. Micetic can tell by the way the child plays.

"It becomes more developmentally normal. The play is more spontaneous, creative, fun," she said. "In the beginning, there was no creativity because the child was carrying the heavy burden of being abused."

That's when it's time for the sessions to come to an end — often a difficult stage for the child.

"I had a boy who walked around and said goodbye to every toy because that's their 'safe place' and they have to learn to separate from it," she said.

The children move on, but often, they need to come back to therapy at various stages in their life.

"As their body changes and they become interested in the opposite sex, all that happened to you needs to be reprocessed because you're at a different maturation schedule," Healy said.

As they grow older, the toys they choose to play with might change. They may be able to explain their feelings through words rather than toys.

As teenagers, they might show their emotions through eating disorders, sexual promiscuity, or self-mutilation rather than bed-wetting and nightmares.

They'll act out their emotions in different ways, but feel them all the same.