The injury that victims of child sexual abuse experience is devastating. This is not only a violation of control over one’s own body; it is forced sexual exploitation that denies the will and autonomy of the child mentally and emotionally. The only hope that child victims of sexual assault have to hold onto is that there is another caretaker or parent who will see the harm that is being done and take them out of harm’s way.

The need to feel that someone is able and willing to protect them when they are being injured is the bedrock of trust and safety in a child’s world. In most cases of child sexual abuse that I have seen in my clinical practice, those who have survived sexual abuse as a child are far angrier at the parent who didn’t protect them than the abuser themself. The realization that the person who could have done something to protect them instead allowed the abuse to continue is a loss of faith and trust in adults that does more damage to the child’s sense of safety in the world than the direct assaults to the body.

This deeply psychological and relational insult to the original injury is amplified exponentially when the child is not only unprotected, but also discredited about the reality they experienced. The child is first denied bodily control, is left in harm’s way, and then subsequently denied the capacity to have their lived reality acknowledged and believed. This triple whammy of injuries to a child is unfortunately not uncommon and can be re-experienced throughout an adult survivor’s life through post-traumatic flashbacks, nightmares, and fear of not being taken seriously by others in their life.

Imagine decades after these harms have been committed that a child sexual abuse survivor sees the nonprotective parent (within whose care they have been removed by child protective services) making a public declaration that their child is lying about their abuse. That is exactly what befell the Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton earlier this month. Having already suffered from the multi-layered impact of being raped, unprotected, discredited, abandoned, and removed from her family, she now has to relive these injuries in public and private because politicians deemed that they could capitalize on her pain for their own political gain.

Dr. Acton’s characterization of this action as exploitative only begins to describe the compounded insult and injury not only to her but to every child sexual assault survivor who was violated sexually, unprotected by any adults, discredited, and uprooted from the only familiar environment they had known. This has been deeply re-traumatizing for hundreds of thousands of survivors around the world. For men in high positions of power to first disregard the impact of a girl being raped by her stepfather, and then disregard the impact of their mother taking the rapist’s side and calling her daughter a liar, and then disregard the pain that would be caused by having this mother, who lost custody of her child, again proclaim in the most public way that her child is a liar is the most egregious form of denial and degradation of children and women I could possibly imagine. Just for political gain.

So many people we know and who we don’t know are now being impacted by this callous disregard of sexual abuse survivors’ experiences, and it highlights a far deeper disregard of women and children in our society. Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford, and the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuses know this all too well. None of them, however, had mothers who took the opportunity to further exploit and injure their child publicly as Amy Acton did.

Let this be a rallying cry that urges us to take children’s experiences of abuse seriously and that channels our outrage into direct support of women’s experiences of sexual violations of all kinds, and allows us to find the courage to stand up to the men who knowingly discredit these women for their own personal gain.

Jeffrey Fishman, Ph.D., is a psychologist who lives in Amherst.