DISCLOSURES
What are disclosures?
Any time when a child communicates to someone about abuse.
Disclosures can be:
- Verbal eg child tells you about abuse.
- Non-verbal eg a child uses pictures, acting, gestures, to communicate about abuse.
- Direct: “Uncle Rodney puts his doodle in my bottom.”
- Indirect – referring to:
- third persons eg “Uncle Rodney likes to do rude things to kids.”
- ‘friends’ eg “My friend has an uncle who touches her bottom.”
- asking questions eg: “Is it naughty for Uncles to put their doodles near kids bottoms?”
- Prompted by a question, a story or activity eg you notice bruises and welts on a child’s upper thigh and when you ask them how the bruises happened they reply, “That’s where Mummy hit me with the stick.”
- Spontaneous - these disclosures can come out of the blue – eg you could be just sitting with a child building things in the sand pit and they say, “Sometimes gooey stuff from Peter’s peeny gets on my hands and it’s yucky.”
A disclosure is any communication from a child that they have been or are being abused. When we talk about a child disclosing it simply means they are revealing that they are being or have been abused.
Disclosures can be verbal when a child tells you about the abuse, or non-verbal where the child uses other methods like acting, gestures or art to tell you about the abuse – or a combination eg a child draws a picture of their father hitting them with a baseball bat and says, “That’s what Daddy does to me.”
Disclosures aren’t always direct and easy – like “Uncle Rodney puts his doodle in my bottom.” Sometimes children use indirect ways to tell us about abuse because it’s easier for them. They might talk about the offender in the third person eg “Uncle Rodney likes to do rude things to kids”, or they might talk about a “friend” who has an uncle who touches her on the bottom, or they might ask a question to test how it will be received – like “Is it naughty for Uncles to put their doodles near kids bottoms?”
Disclosures can be prompted by a question or a story such as a question about how they got an injury, - “That’s where Mummy hit me with the stick”, or a story about a child who goes to the movies with their Uncle, “I don’t like going to the movies with Uncle Peter because he’s rude to me”, or an activity that might be something the offender does with them, “Uncle Peter plays cars with me but I don’t like playing with him because he’s rude and plays with no pants on.”
Other times a disclosure can be spontaneous and come out of the blue. It might take you by surprise so that you’re left wondering if you heard what you heard! You could be doing something routine like building things in the sandpit when you hear, “Sometimes gooey stuff from Peter’s peeny gets on my hands and it’s yucky.”
