MOLESTATION, DRUGS LINKED: MINISTER

OTTAWA -- Public Health Minister Carolyn Bennett says governments must
openly confront links between drug and alcohol addiction and the sexual
abuse of children.

"We cannot deal with things that we're afraid to talk about," Bennett told
a news conference yesterday as a national study was released on child abuse
and neglect.

"We actually have to begin to take on the links that we know of between
incest and alcohol and drug abuse. This is huge."

The Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect says
confirmed sexual abuse cases dropped in 2003 to 2,935 from 4,322 in 1998.

But Bennett says there's concern that the drop may only illustrate
increasing reluctance to report sexual abuse.

Hard-line treatment of child molestation as a police matter could be
scaring victims into silence because they are often abused by someone they
know and love, experts say. Results were culled from reports filed over
three months by 63 child welfare agencies -- excluding Quebec, where data
was compiled differently.

Lead researcher Nico Trocme says results of the $800,000 project, mostly
funded by the federal Public Health Department, are inconclusive.

"It could be very good news or it could mean that we need to soften our
approach.

"We need to do more research."

Childhood sexual abuse is a common trait shared by hundreds of native
women, many of them drug-addicted, who have been murdered or gone missing
across Canada since 1985.

Many native communities are still suffering the fallout from more than
three generations of physical and sexual abuse suffered in federal
residential schools. Ottawa acknowledged in 1998 that abuse in the
church-run schools was rampant. A federal researcher who specializes in
aboriginal issues says child welfare workers on reserves are chronically
overstretched.

Rosalind Prober, president of the independent children's-rights group
Beyond Borders, is skeptical of any suggestion that sexual abuse is on the
decline.

"There's a great silencing about this crime that we have not overcome as a
society," she said from Toronto where she was attending an international
police conference on sex offences.

"Children are still silent, they are not believed."

The report released yesterday shows that the incidence of all forms of
reported child abuse and neglect in Canada in 2003 was up 125 per cent from
1998, the last time it was measured. Trocme cautions that the jump in cases
isn't necessarily because more children are being maltreated, but because
of increased reporting.