Our organization’s philosophy is as follows:
The first step to preventing child sexual abuse is to hold individuals accountable. However, this isn’t enough. To inspire families and communities to push for a change in societal attitudes and government policies, we need to expand the concept of adult responsibility. We cannot identify effective solutions until we confront the real issue—people we care about who have lost control.
The Help Services provides free and confidential direct support and information to individuals who have questions or concerns about child sexual abuse. Contact the national prevention helpline (1.888.PREVENT), e-mail and chat services, as well as an interactive Online Help Center for those who are concerned about child sexual abuse. Your support is essential to our work.
Please be aware that the following information may be difficult to read and may affect you. If you are a survivor reading this, please take care of yourself and talk with someone about how you are feeling.
The trauma we experienced as children haunts us to this day. Some survivors are still troubled by memories of abuse and feel pain, confusion, and loneliness as a result. Survivors may not remember that they were abused, may remember only a few experiences, or may not know at all. It may be difficult for them to acknowledge or understand what they experienced as abuse and neglect.
In many cases, survivors of abuse reject the idea that their experience was abusive or even try to lessen its impact by describing it as a single-time event barely worth mentioning. They may not even realize how their symptoms are connected to the abuse, but their bodies continue to relive those feelings through panic attacks, anxiety, inexplicable fears, and pain because their bodies remember the incident in many different ways.
If you are unsure whether you have been sexually abused, here are some indicators you may experience. Sexual abuse involves a violation of power and trust, regardless of whether the abuser is an adult or an older child.
Sexual abuse can be indicated by the following signs:
- Feeling uncomfortable when being cuddled or kissed
- Discomfort during bathing or cleaning
- Seeing other people’s genitals
- Being forced to touch other people’s genitals
- Having your hands placed on your breasts or genitals
- Being photographed or filmed in sexually explicit content
- Listening to sexual conversations or watching sexual films
- Having an object or penis penetrate your vagina or anus
Since early childhood trauma education has improved, people are now more open about their own childhood sexual trauma. Adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse may experience a range of impacts. While some survivors of sexual abuse do not suffer from mental health problems, others do.
There are a number of factors that contribute to traumas like sexual abuse:
- The nature and severity of the abuse
- Your age when the abuse occurred
- Your relationship with the abuser(s)
- The duration of the abuse
- How people in your life responded to your disclosures (whether they believed you)
You may experience some of the following effects:
- Your abuser may have sworn you to secrecy, threatened you and your family, or told you something bad would happen if you told anyone.
- The most common forms of sexual abuse are coercion, bribery, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and threats.
- You might have feared that speaking out would result in punishment, blame, abandonment, or not being believed.
- As a child, you may have felt helpless and powerless over your life and your body.
- Your abuser may have encouraged you to believe the abuse was your fault, making you feel like a bad person.
As a child, you may have been burdened with the responsibility of keeping the abuse a secret. This can lead to feelings of duty towards maintaining family unity and interfere with a normal childhood. It is not uncommon for survivors of abuse to feel isolated from their peers due to the need to keep secrets and cope with stress alone. The betrayal felt by abused children is compounded by their dependence on adults for nurturing and protection, often leading to conflicted feelings towards the abuser, who may have been someone they trusted and cared for. It is also possible to feel let down by a non-abusing parent who was unable to protect them. It’s natural for anger to be one of the strongest emotions experienced after abuse. This anger can be directed at the abuser as well as those who failed to intervene. Along with anger, there may also be feelings of sadness stemming from a sense of loss, especially if there was trust in the abuser. It is possible that you may grieve the loss of innocence or the fact that you were forced to mature prematurely due to the abuse.
Experiencing a flashback can feel like a nightmare and bring back all the emotions you felt at the time of the abuse.
The lack of trust in others may contribute to lower relationship satisfaction, more discord, increased domestic violence, and more breakups and divorces among survivors. Survivors of sexual abuse may develop psychological disorders in adulthood, regardless of whether they have experienced few or many difficulties related to the abuse. These disorders may include one or more of the following:
- Depression or feeling down
- Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
- Low self-esteem
- Eating disorders
- Drug or alcohol addiction
- Suicide attempts, self-harm, and self-mutilation
- Anxiety
- Dissociative disorders or episodes of ‘splitting out’
- Personality disorders
- Disorders of the mind
- Bipolar disorders
People who were abused as children, especially sexually, tend to use general practitioners, emergency rooms, and medical care services more frequently than those who were not abused. Adults who have experienced child sexual abuse are more likely to suffer from unexplained pain, diabetes, gastrointestinal problems, arthritis, headaches, gynecological problems, strokes, hepatitis, and heart disease.
