At Risk Youth

Deena Dearburff Schmidt was on the 1972 Olympic swim team. During her training in the 1960s, she was molested repeatedly by her coach. Though she told USA Swimming officials, the coach was allowed to continue training young girls, and was even inducted in the International Swimming Hall of Fame.

She told of her experience a day after a lawsuit was filed in Santa Clara County alleging that a woefully inadequate background check policy has fostered sexual molestation in youth swimming. Schmidt is not a plaintiff in the case but her story is included in it. [Source: The Associated Press].

The Santa Clara lawsuit was originally filed on behalf of a teenage girl who said she had been molested by her coach. The coach eventually pled guilty to 20 separate charges and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

USA Swimming executive director Chuck Wielgus told the Associated Press that the organization takes allegations of abuse very seriously, and that each allegation is immediately investigated. He also stated that, though USA Swimming offers guidance and support, hiring decisions rest with each local club.

Childhood trauma may cause some adults gain weight and have difficulty losing it, according to a new study of more than 17,000 patients in the Kaiser Permanente health system.

In 1987 Dr. Vincent Felitti studied 286 obese people in the Kaiser system and found that 50% had been sexually abused as children, a much higher rate than average. He decided to look into other kinds of childhood trauma that may be linked to overweight, and began to investigate previous studies.

• One study of more than 11,000 women found that those who had been abused as children were 27 percent more likely to be overweight.
• A study of 15,000 teenagers found that sexual childhood abuse in males raised their risk of obesity as adults to 66 percent.
• Dr. Felitti then began the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) study involving a database of over 17,000 Kaiser patients.

Dr. Felitti and his colleagues defined adverse experience as ongoing childhood neglect, living with one or no biological parent, having a mentally ill or drug addicted parent, having a parent in jail, witnessing domestic violence, and sexual, physical or emotional abuse. Children who had four or more of these experiences had double the risk of obesity, double the risk of heart attack and stroke, and four times the risk for emphysema.

Dr. Felitti and others believe that food is a comforting escape for abused children.

“Being fat is not the problem,” he said. “It’s the solution.”

What’s more troubling about the study is that some researchers believe that adverse experiences in childhood can lead to permanent biological changes in certain areas of the body, and that such changes are passed down from one generation to the next.