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

Summary and Conclusions

The Israeli Independent Public Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse highlights the following main conclusions: Child sexual abuse is a broad social problem with serious and long-term consequences. Treatment of the phenomenon of child abuse should take a system-wide perspective on the contexts that impact the lives of child victims and adults who were abused as children. The testimonies written by survivors of child sexual abuse in Israel reveal a very common experience of: The most prominent experience that arises in the testimonies of survivors is the experience of extreme loneliness in the wake of the abuse. Children who experienced sexual abuse and live in Israel feel, from all the surrounding systems – whether formal or informal – a sense of not being seen, condemnation, exclusion, inequality, and that their rights are not realized. The survivors shared distressing experiences in their encounters with the systems meant to protect them, which, on the contrary, generated experiences that recreated the original trauma and even produced more traumas. The experience of extreme loneliness is even more powerful in the case of children who were sexually abused by a member of their family. In these cases, the children who found it in their power to disclose the abuse are forced to endure many losses; completely alone, they must face all the figures in their lives, and are banished into profound loneliness that becomes their fate throughout their lives. The harrowing testimonies submitted by the survivors draw attention to two unfavorable outcomes of the responses of Israeli systems to child sexual “I am a stepchild of the system”

The Israeli Independent Public Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse

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