A common form of sexual abuse is by siblings or cousins. If you are parenting a foster or adopted child who was sexually abused by an older child, particularly by a sibling or cousin, you will have added issues to deal with. The most difficult one is the adopted child feeling responsible for the abuse.

I see this issue frequently among adult survivors of sexual abuse. They believe that, because the abuser was also a child, they must have consented to the abuse or be partially responsible for it. You might hear this line of reasoning from older adopted children, particularly those in their teens. The problem is that, as abused children grow older, they judge themselves through their teen or adult eyes and lose sight of their vulnerability as a young child. They forget that a 12-year-old child is not a peer of an eight-year-old.

In most cases, the abusive sibling is older, often by three or more years. Think about an eight-year-old’s “power” over a five-year-old. They are hardly peers. The younger child views the older child as a “big kid” and typically views the older child as an authority figure of sorts. So, there not a mutual relationship between the siblings.

Unfortunately, child abuse survivors tend to discount the difference in age.

Anyone who has parented a traumatized foster or adopted child can tell you that parenting a traumatized child is not for the faint of heart. These kids can put you through the wringer. You can shower them with love and show them nothing but kindness, but they can still choose not to trust you and test every boundary you set (as well as many you never even thought of). At what point should you give up? When do you say, “Enough!”

I have two answers for this – one from the perspective of the parent and one from the perspective of the child. Let’s start with the child…

I do not believe that any child is a lost cause. As long as your traumatized foster or adopted child is still breathing, there is hope for that child. However, that hope lies in the hands of the child, and there is nothing that you can do to change this. You can shower that child with all of the love and support in the world, but you cannot reach that child unless and until that child chooses to receive that love. Every child has the capacity to make that choice. Unfortunately, for you as an adoptive parent, you have no control over whether your child will ever choose to let you in.

That brings me to the other perspective – the parent.

I know several adoptive families who have adopted a traumatized child out of foster care, poured themselves into trying to help the child heal, and then had to make the difficult decision to place the adopted child into a residential treatment facility. Is this decision a “failure” on the part of the adoptive parents? Absolutely not!

In fact, it takes a lot of wisdom to reach a place where you recognize that the child will best be served in a residential treatment facility. In some cases, the focus is on what is best for the family as well. If you have other children in the home, it isn’t fair to them for their home life to be tumultuous for long stretches of time. While they might be able to endure it for a few weeks, or even months, it really isn’t fair for the other children to suffer for years on end as all of the parents’ focus must be on trying to contain and control an out-of-control child.

Unfortunately, those who have never parented an out-of-control child, or known someone who has, are likely to be judgmental of this decision.

One of the challenges of parenting a traumatized child is figuring out the right balance of just how honest to be with the adopted child. On the one hand, you should never lie to your adopted child because, if you do, your child is never going to learn to trust you. Before your traumatized child, whose trust has been shattered, can even have the hope of learning to trust you, you must be trustworthy.

However, on the flip side of this is that you do not want to burden a child with any more information than he or she needs to know at a particular age and stage of development. In fact, it is possible to trigger flashbacks before a child is ready to deal with a particular trauma if you start talking about something that the child is not yet ready to face.

For example, a couple of years ago, my sister (who suffered most of the same abuses that I did) told me that she could handle anything as long as she did not suffer from animal rape. Her mention of this caused me to have a flashback right then and there, and I was not yet ready to deal with it. Because I was not yet ready to process this particular trauma, I experienced a very heavy nosedive, complete with self-injury and suicidal urges. You don’t want to do this to your adopted child.