Childhood Sexual Abuse

Child maltreatment and abuse can occur in several ways, in order there are four main types that are the most influenced on child’s development. This paper will provide an overview of the state of knowledge on child sexual abuse, in which we will dive deep into details to know more about what’s is considered sexual abuse? What are the symptoms and the signs of child who is sexually abused? Dive into knowing more about the long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse. And finally, how can we prevent child abuse and maltreatment? To begin, childhood sexual abuse is an important and a serious problem that has a full attention from years ago. The number of women who were victims of childhood sexual abuse much exceeds the number of men

Research has confirmed that the current percentages of actual sexual victims is reported a minimum range of one in 4 for girls, and one in 10 for boys (Beth,L., & Danny,J., & Robinson,J., 1999). Sexual abuse can be divided into several forms, it can be as a temptation from a familial member and it can be a rough behavior committed by a strange person. It’s not easy to formulate a clear or a correct definition for sexual abuse because of its variety of forms, and its level of frequencies. Maltz (2002) gives the following definition: “sexual abuse occurs whenever one person dominates and exploits another by means of sexual activity or suggestion” (Maltz, 2001a, as cited in Maltz, 2002, p.321). Sexual abuse is more likely to happen during childhood or adolescence period, and its effectuation differs from

Sexual abuse could occur in different ways, it could be seen in the behavior of a child, for example, sleep disturbance, and overeating… It could be also felt by how the child feels towards other, how the child starts to have unusual actions towards some people, especially if there’s any kind of abuse from relatives. The symptoms can also take place as a physical signs such as bleeding in the sensitive areas in the body, unusual sexual behavior, diseases that could be transmitted through intercourse (Kairys,S. , Alexander,R. , Block,R. , Everett,D. , Hymel,C. , Johnson,C. ,1999). As we already mentioned before, child sexual abuse is strongly correlated with the anxiety and depression that every abused child pass by. Besides the depression phase, the child’s self-esteem gradually starts to be low; he/she will start to blame him/herself for the things that happened, that feeling of guilt and shame will never leave the victim. Certainly, all of those symptoms could affect somehow the future of the victims. It could create problems not only by thinking negatively about themselves, but to think in a negative way to others as well, for instance, it will create sexual problems with their marital partners, problems in relationships especially in the adolescent