What is childhood sexual abuse?

According to Health Canada:

"Child sexual abuse occurs when a child is used for the sexual gratification of an adult or adolescent. It involves the exposure or behaviour, and may include invitation to sexual touching, intercourse, or other forms of exploitation, such as juvenile prostitution or pornography."

Penny Simkin, author of When Survivors Give Birth, gives a similar definition:

"Childhood sexual abuse takes place between a child (anyone under 16) and an adult or someone close in age, whom the child perceives as more powerful... any activity — physical, psychological or verbal — that the abuser expects to cause sexual arousal in the abuser or someone else..."

Childhood sexual abuse includes the following:

• Physical abuse: vaginal, oral and anal penetration with any object other than that for medical purposes, fondling, coercing the child to touch someone else's genitals or perform a sexual act with another adult, child or animal
• Verbal abuse: demeaning a child's physical appearance or sexuality, using language that is sexually exploitative and developmentally inappropriate
• Psychological/emotional abuse: not allowing the child personal privacy, shaming the child for normal sexual development (breasts, menstruation, masturbation), exposing a child to pornography or other sexual acts including intercourse, masturbation and voiding
• Children are also subject to exploitation through trafficking and being used in the production of child pornography.

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It is important to remember that children face a myriad of confusing feelings and emotions related to the abuse they are experiencing. While many children experience abuse, each child copes in their own unique way.

Overcoming the abuse will depend on a variety of factors, such as whether there are any "safe" people in the child's life, the child's inherent resiliency factors, the duration, frequency and severity of the abuse. Therefore, abuse is defined from the perspective of the survivor. We can't compare types of abuse and say with certainty how one child will respond and cope based on the experiences of another child.

What we do know, is that trauma from abuse tends to be more severe if the abuse involved any of the following:

• the acts were perpetrated repeatedly over a long period of time
• the acts involved penetration
• threats were made to the child — threats of injury or death to a loved one or family pet if they disclosed
• the perpetrator was a close relative or caregiver
• the child lacked support or "safe" people
• the child was punished, silenced or received other negative consequences when they disclosed

Children learn to cope with the unpredictable and frightening nature of abuse in ways that assist them in maintaining their primary attachment to their caregiver(s). For many children, this means shifting the responsibility for the abuse from the abuser on themselves, minimizing the extent of the abuse or denying it. For some children the abuse is so profound that they learn to dissociate from their bodies in order to cope with the physical and/or emotional pain they are experiencing. Dissociation can range from daydreaming to completely disconnecting from their physical selves.

They may believe that there is something wrong with them, that they are worthless and deserving of the abuse.

Sexually abused children learn coping strategies that give them ways to manage their feelings about loss of control, unpredictability, violation and betrayal. As adults, survivors still manifest the learned behaviours and attitudes that helped them survive as children:

• hyper vigilant
• controlling
• resistant / overly-compliant
• aggressive
• mistrustful of others

These adaptive mechanisms helped to keep them "safe" as children. For instance, the ability of the child to "read" his/her environment helped him/her assess, on some level, whether the abuser was in a good mood/bad mood or had been using. As adults, this same skill makes survivors particularly sensitive to people's tone and body language. Trust building can be difficult and usually involves commitment on the part of the caregiver to spend ample time to allow a therapeutic relationship to develop.

Finkelhor's model of the four ways in which sexual abuse causes problems for the child (A Source Book on Child Sexual Abuse, Finkelhor, David and Sharon Araji. Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 1986) provides us with a framework for understanding how women who have survived abuse may be responding to care providers during the childbearing year in ways that are at times adversarial and/or completely passive.

Traumatic sexualization

When a child is being abused sexually, he/she often feels frightened, confused and distressed during the sexual abuse and lives in a constant state of hyper-alertness when the abuse is not occurring. Sexual abuse survivors continue into adulthood to have fears and phobias related to sex, may have flashbacks of abuse during sex and can be very confused about their own sexuality if they were abused by someone of the same sex. Sometimes sexual abuse also involves intense physical abuse and therefore "what gets fired together in the brain, fuses together"... abuse and sex, love and pain, shame and their body become linked and associated with one another.

Stigmatization

When children are being abused sexually they often believe for a time that the abuse is normal. As they grow into adulthood the realization often comes that the abuse was not normal and therefore the victim/survivor feels intense shame, guilt and completely different from others. They may abuse or punish themselves for being "bad" and engage in self-harming behaviours which further reinforce their feelings of worthlessness, difference and shame.

Betrayal

Betrayal is experienced as a kind of loss — someone they trusted, admired or depended on, violated and abused them. Building trust with strangers becomes very difficult when people in their past whom they cared for, betrayed them.

Powerlessness

A child who is being abused experiences intense feelings of powerlessness. The child is unable to stop the abuse and this can have life-long impacts on the survivor's ability to set and stick with healthy personal boundaries... this can lead to further victimization of the survivor and feelings that the survivor will always be a victim, they "must go looking for abuse" or "it must be something about me that attracts abusers".

- About Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse: (you are on page 1) - page 2 - page 3 -
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