The Israeli Independent Public - Abstract of the Inquiry Report - December 2021

births are often experienced as intrusive, eliciting traumatic memories and generating anxiety. When such interventions are performed in the absence of a health system that is well-informed about sexual abuse and trauma, they recreate the trauma for the survivors. The survivors also describe another major obstacle in their encounter with the health system, namely – how they are perceived and labeled by the system. Specifically, survivors attest that the health system labels them as psychiatric patients, although they are in fact suffering from post-traumatic reactions to the abuse they underwent. According to them, being labeled as “psychiatric patients” reflects the system’s blindness regarding the problem that is the true source of their suffering. Survivors attest that in many cases, the treatment they received was insensitive or inappropriate to their situation, that the focus of medical staff was mainly on providing tranquilizers, and that the abuse they had experienced and its repercussions were ignored. All these caused painful experiences that arose during treatment and were not addressed, leading survivors to avoid treatment. In fact, in many cases the encounter with the health system was so unsettling, hurtful, and traumatic that survivors had to undergo a process of recovery and treatment following the medical intervention that was supposed to treat and aid them. According to survivors’ testimonies, few services in the health system provide treatment to survivors of sexual abuse, and even these few are not easily accessible. Thus, the system does no refer survivors to these services on its own initiative; the services are geographically remote; and they are not adapted to the survivors’ various cultural and religious backgrounds. Four urgent messages to the Israeli health system arise from the testimonies: (1) Mandatory training on the subject of child sexual abuse must be provided to all health system staff, with emphasis on the identification of abuse. In training programs, emphasis should be laid on knowledge, practical skills, and changing workers’ personal and professional attitudes . As shown by survivors’ testimonies, appropriate protocols must be developed for identifying and reporting children that are suspected of being victims of sexual abuse. The survivors emphasized that even when they did not report the abuse,

The Israeli Independent Public Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse

23