Research has shown that many children are affected by sexual abuse. There are also certain risk factors that may increase the likelihood of childhood sexual abuse. It's important to know the warning signs that a child may have been sexually abused.
There are both physical and behavioral symptoms that include:. A child may also start to be overly protective of their friends or siblings. This is known as taking on a "caretaker" role.
In addition, they may revert to thumb-sucking or other behaviors of younger children. For more mental health resources, see our National Helpline Database. With childhood sexual abuse, the perpetrators often exhibit a pattern of behavior called grooming. This is a strategy used to disarm victims and their families into trusting the perpetrator, making it more difficult to detect them as an abuser.
For instance, perpetrators of childhood sexual abuse will often take on a "father figure" role, sometimes even choosing professions like bus driver or counselor so they can gain close access to children. The perpetrator is also likely to develop close relationships with the child and their family. They may also "desensitize the child to touch," or touch them harmlessly many times before violating them sexually.
The offender will hide behind these and other tactics to assure that their transgressions aren't revealed.
Unfortunately, victims of childhood sexual abuse experience impacts across all areas of their lives. These are known as adverse childhood experiences ACE. A person who experiences childhood sexual trauma may have physical injuries and sexually transmitted infections STIs.
Traumatic experiences like sexual abuse have also been associated with an increased risk of chronic health conditions later in life, such as obesity, cancer, and heart disease. Mentally blocking out memories of past trauma is a psychological defense known as dissociation. Because they are so emotionally painful, recollections of abuse are often buried deep. Difficulty recalling childhood memories may be an indicator of past exposure to trauma.
If you suspect something may have happened to you as a child but you aren't quite sure, seeking treatment can help you to gain a better understanding.
The consequences of childhood sexual abuse can manifest in various ways. Abuse in childhood is also linked to higher rates of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance use, and risky sexual behaviors that may result in STIs or pregnancy.
Hypersexuality or sex addiction is also more likely to occur in victims of abuse. In some individuals, food addiction and other eating disorders —such as anorexia and bulimia—may also be triggered by sexual abuse. The risk of suicide increases for someone who's experienced childhood sexual assault. This includes suicidal ideation and attempted suicides.
If you are having suicidal thoughts, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at for support and assistance from a trained counselor. If you or a loved one are in immediate danger, call For instance, females exposed to sexual abuse as children are two to thirteen times more likely to experience sexual abuse again as adults.
In addition, someone who was sexually abused as a child is two times more likely to experience non-sexual domestic abuse by a future partner. Trauma-focused treatments for childhood sexual abuse often include therapy to process the experience and medication to manage symptoms.
If the family of a child who recently experienced sexual abuse is seeking treatment, they are often assigned a case manager who will connect them with a team of health care professionals. There are several different types of therapies for survivors of childhood sexual assault. But through it all, she has remained unconvinced by the science behind repressed memories. But that you take this chunk of traumatic feelings and wall it off, and it resides there in some pristine form?
It leaks and makes you do bad things and have symptoms, and you need to peel away this layer of repression? In , the British Psychological Society convened a team to consider whether some psychologists might be accidentally implanting false memories of child sexual abuse in their clients. And once I could find the name, I could get into the divorce file, and find the records that began to convince me this mother was innocent. It was tragic. It completely destroyed me. My kids are everything to me and they always came first.
It was being used and introduced in other cases as proof that repressed memories were real — and used against other people that I would bet my house were innocent. As the psychologist continued to dig, Corwin worked out who was behind the investigation. Horrified by the intrusion, in , Kluemper tried to bring it to a halt.
At that time, Elizabeth Loftus was at the University of Washington. I went to the University of Washington, the ethical use of human subjects committee, and I asked them to review what she had done. The University of Washington put Loftus under investigation, but she was cleared of any wrongdoing.
She left the university, but continued to investigate the case. In , now at Irvine, she published an article. Kluemper remembers vividly the day Loftus published her article concluding it was likely that Jane Doe had never been sexually abused.
Although Loftus had not directly named her, Kluemper believed it was possible to identify her through the article. News organisations take particular care when reporting on the victims of sexual abuse to ensure that they cannot be identified by jigsaw identification, which is when pieces of information fit together to identify a victim.
I lost the ability to trust people. I am still trying to get that back completely. It was like someone threw a brick through the front of my life, and it shattered around me. Furious, she approached the American Psychological Association , but Loftus had resigned from the organisation, so there was no recourse there. Kluemper decided to sue. The suit went through two rounds of court. Today, Loftus says she regrets the financial crisis that engulfed Kluemper.
She may not remember that part of the conversation. The costs were unpayable for Kluemper, and her navy advisers recommended that she declare bankruptcy. That meant leaving the navy. Once again, Kluemper found her life collapsing. Knowledge about details of traumatic experiences and some of their possible effects can help professional caregivers formulate a treatment approach that might reduce symptoms and improve daily functioning. The point of trauma-focused therapy is not to make people remember all the disturbing things that ever happened to them.
People do not need to remember every detail in order to heal. Rather, the goal of psychotherapy is to help people gain authority over their trauma-related memories and feelings so that they can get on with their lives. To do this, people often have to talk in detail about their past experiences. Through talking, they are able to acknowledge the trauma—remember it, feel it, think about it, share it and put it in perspective.
At the same time, to prevent the past from continuing to influence the present negatively, it is vital to focus on the present, since the goal of treatment is to help individuals live healthier, more functional lives in the here and now. Just as it is harmful for people to believe that something horrible happened to them when nothing did, it is equally harmful for people to believe that nothing happened when something bad did occur. Ultimately, the individual involved—not the therapist—must reach a conclusion about what happened in the past.
Good therapy shouldn't create or reinforce false beliefs, whether the beliefs are of having been abused or of not having been abused. Competent therapists realize their job is not to convince someone about a certain set of beliefs, but to let reality unfold for each person according to the individual's own experience, interpretation and understanding. Helpful psychotherapy provides a neutral, supportive environment for understanding oneself and one's past.
This colors their present and future, affecting their life experiences in a detrimental manner. While time disruptions caused by tiredness and jet-lag can have relatively minor and short-term effects, traumatic experiences leave a lasting imprint in our psyches, an imprint which tampers, among other things, with our capacity for time perception and autobiographical memory.
Due to the intrinsic nature of time perception, which is deep-rooted in us, the damage caused by trauma can often be initially undetectable and consequently difficult to repair, once uncovered. From the interviews, it became apparent that survivors perception of time is affected in a similar manner, with survivors repeatedly referring to common experiences relating to their perception of time that were damaged following their abuse; they described a constant disintegration of their minds, bodies, and identities, leaving them adrift in a time and space, without the ability to grasp or order their past experiences or to objectively anticipate a positive future.
Survivors who were sexually abused as children are akin to buildings without solid foundations — unable to build additional floors as the delicate, breakable foundation is not strong enough to endure any advancement, leaving the building incomplete and vulnerable, powerless to survive the elements.
The model relates to the normative manner in which time is perceived, alongside the warped manner in which it is perceived by CSA survivors. While the majority of people experience the past as a collection of reflections and memories, positive and negative, the past portrayed by CSA survivors was filled with memories of abuse and trauma that obliterated other memories. The present was usually experienced as a chaotic state of limbo rife with flashbacks and dissociative episodes.
CSA survivors suffered trepidation and fear that their past will be repeated in the future, without the normal anticipation and planning see Figure 1. The warped perception of time described is fertile ground for the feeling experienced by survivors — an uphill, ongoing battle for their wellbeing, which included three stages: a state of limbo adrift in time and space followed, by disintegration of body, mind, and identity and ultimately leading to chaos, exhaustion and frustration.
The fact that survivors are trapped in a vicious cycle for years raises the question about the brain function area that might be affected by this traumatic experience.
That is, to what extent is CSA trauma registered in the brain and, if so, how could this be treated. A recent study on the revival of dissociated memories as a result of hyperbaric oxygen treatment seems to imply that this kind of treatment might reactivate somatosensory brain areas that were damaged due to CSA Efrati et al.
Nonetheless, the current study implies that the issue of time perception should definitely be further studied and included within the focal of treatment. RL-V was responsible for data collection.
AJ-K conducted thematic data analysis. Both authors jointly completed the discussion, contributed to manuscript revision, and approved the submitted version. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Journal List Front Psychol v. Front Psychol. Published online Apr Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer.
This article was submitted to Psychology for Clinical Settings, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Received Oct 18; Accepted Apr 4. The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author s and the copyright owner s are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice.
No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. Abstract Child sexual abuse CSA is a worldwide phenomenon with negative outcomes for survivors whose lives and well-being are compromised into adulthood, due to the trauma caused by the abuse.
Keywords: child sexual abuse, time perception, memory deficit, trauma, dissociation, life story. Introduction The trauma of child sexual abuse CSA is a phenomenon which has been studied extensively, particularly in relation to risk factors and long-term physical and emotional consequences. Perception of Time, Memory and Trauma Time perception refers to the subjective manner in which a person experiences the passage of time or the perceived duration of events, which can vary significantly between individuals and circumstances Carstensen, Captured in Time Droit-Volet and Gil studied the time-emotion paradox, which deals with the effect of emotion on the presumably accurate inner-clock humans have been proven to possess.
Materials and Methods The study followed a qualitative research approach, involving the use of the life history interview as the primary method Bertaux, Participants and Procedure Open-ended life story interviews of 50 participants were randomly selected from life story interviews collected by LW since as part of a broader research.
Data Analysis A qualitative approach to data analysis was used Creswell, : The life history interview Bertaux, , which allows participants to impart their subjective life experience in their words, emphasizing or omitting at their own will Berntsen et al.
Findings Theoretical categories detected in the data were condensed into general, comprehensive themes, with three time-related themes emerging: Adrift in time and space; disintegration of body, mind and identity; chaos, exhaustion, and confusion. Adrift in Time and Space Child sexual abuse survivors frequently described their lives as characterized by a state of limbo — adrift in space and time without an anchor, devoid of positive memories of the past, prior to the abuse, as the abuse had obliterated their previous identity.
When reflecting upon her childhood, Mia summarized her experience as being a prisoner trapped in time: I was trapped in the past and the present without a future. Alice, who had been raped at age 14 and subsequently became addicted to drugs and adapted promiscuous behavior, which led to two abortions before she turned 16, referred to an obliteration of childhood memories from the period before her rape: I have no special or good memories from my childhood.
This memory deficit is especially interesting because Alice chose to describe her life as normal before being raped at age The rape is where everything began. Where Was I?
The abuse that one carries around constantly acts as a captor, entrapping survivors in a state of disorientation and confusion, where time is meaningless, and the only constant is the abuse itself, as precisely noted by Violet: Being abused is like cancer of the soul, it finds its way into little cracks like water and stays there. Along with the traumatic memories, Gabriella stored negative feelings, such as shame, guilt, and blame, which accompanied the abuse: I remember, I have another image of me at 10 and my brother at eight and we are having sex.
While some survivors claimed to obtain a sense of control over the memories of being abused, others, like Tammy noted that the abuse, even when stored away, was a constant element in her married life: I remember that while I was married, for quite a few years, 13 or 15 years, the pictures [of the abuse] accompanied me all the time. Unlike Tammy, Caroline who was raped at age 10, remembers an active act of erasing the abuse in order to refrain from dealing with it: As soon as I left there [the art gallery where Caroline was raped] it was over.
The Blurred Duration of Abuse The ability to recollect significant life events and to know when they occurred enables one to create a clear life narrative. The absence of an anchor means that there is no basis to return to and time loses its key role in providing order: Looking back it seems absurd to have kept the secret from my mother for so long. Emily related to the discrepancy between the ongoing abuse, which occurred at least twice a week for five years, and her lack of comprehension in grasping the extent of the abuse: When it happens, again and again, you say to yourself, okay, because you have two or three days between each time.
Violet, mentioned earlier, who had been molested by her swimming instructor, referred to an objective indicator, the weather, in order to pinpoint when the abuse took place; nevertheless, she was still not sure of her age at the time: The abuse happened when I was 11 or 12, I was on a swimming team and the instructor messed with me. Abigail, who was sexually abused by her brother for a decade, from age seven, and sexually abused by a family friend from age 14, spoke about the distorted sleeping patterns she still suffers from, as an adult, a decade after the abuse ended: Part of the problem is that it stays with you, not the actual rape, but the sleeping pattern.
Abigail explains that once she understood that the abuse was not normal behavior, her sleep, during the years of abuse, was disrupted: It took me a few years to understand what was going on, after all, I was a young girl, it was only at 14 that I understood that it was wrong.
Dissociation as a Coping Mechanism One of the functions that time fulfills is that of putting experiences into a context, enabling a creation of order: for the past, it is remembering experiences and linking them to outer stimuli; for the present, it is relating to ongoing experiences; and in the future, it is about planning ahead and anticipating.
Sarah, mentioned previously who was abused regularly by her father, depicted the dissociative experience in almost whimsical terms that are in stark contrast to the horrific experiences that she endured: The experience was so difficult that I disconnected. Despite acknowledging her dissociation by name, Bella downplayed its effect on her life: My dissociation was minor. The encounter was a reenactment of her childhood trauma, during which she dissociated, just as she did as a child: I went over to his house and there was a situation, a sexual attack, not a violent one, it was something consensual.
Along with the dangerous behaviors, Bella described the loneliness that accompanies dissociative episodes: Even when I was in a relationship I felt lonely.
Like Bella, Nancy who was raped by a friend from her neighborhood when she was 14, referred to her dissociative tendencies as confusing and dangerous: All this disconnectedness, there is so much of it, I can be having a conversation with a friend and decide that I want to have a shower and invite them to shower with me so we can continue talking, without understanding that inviting a guy to shower usually leads to something.
Emily, who was introduced earlier had been repeatedly abused by a neighbor from age 13, she also described her dissociation in exact terms: I disconnected my body from my feelings. I disowned my body. I gave my body away. A similar coping technique was used by Nadine, who was raped by her uncle during a family trip at age 11 and abused repeatedly by her father, for six years from age, 11 until age To escape the physical pain I taught myself to close my eyes and go inside to block out the pain.
The dissociative episodes continued, years after the abuse had ended, as Ruth relates: I remember that he used to lay me down on the bed and I used to see it from the side […] in high school and in university, I was in a different world, I could go to different places in my mind as if I was not in the class. At a later point during the interview Abigail referred to dissociating by detaching her nighttime abusive experiences from her daily life: For many years I completely disconnected what went on in the day from what went on in the night.
She described her dissociation akin to the experience of fainting: I do not remember, it is as if I fainted and have no recollection […] remembering is horrible but not being able to remember is even worse. Miriam, who was raped at age 17 by a close friend, described carrying on with her life in what she perceived to be a normative manner: I convinced myself that I was okay.
In the same way, Tammy, formerly mentioned, described an exterior existence in which she functioned normally, while actually being disconnected: After the abuse stopped I was very busy and active at school and in the youth movement, but I was actually cruising through the days without knowing where I was, which world I was in.
Discussion The Sisyphean Existence of CSA Survivors Survivors who partook in the study were not asked directly about the subject of time perception but nonetheless related to the subject repeatedly. Open in a separate window.
Author Contributions RL-V was responsible for data collection. Conflict of Interest Statement The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. References Baddeley A. Human Memory: Theory and Practice. London: Taylor and Francis Group. Life story coherence and its relation to psychological well-being. Stress 31 35— A review of the short-term effects of child sexual abuse.
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