How Sexual Abuse Impacted the Physical and Mental Development of Children? Liew Kok Long
Language & Knowledge
Ms. Wy Yee Chan
7 March 2015
HOW SEXUAL ABUSE IMPACTED THE PHYSICAL AND MENTAL DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN
Introduction
“The sexual abuse and exploitation of children is one of the most vicious crimes conceivable, a violation of mankind's most basic duty to protect the innocent.”-James T. Walsh (Brainy Quotes 2015)
Most of the time, people always think that sexual abuse only happen on women or ladies. However, sexual abuse on children also often happens. According to a journal article, most studies had shown that sexual abuse not only focused on women, but sexual abuse of children nowadays is extremely common too. (Dube et al
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Children sexual abuse involves a wide range of activities done on children sexually and it usually done by someone believed by the children. (Cashmore & Shackel 2013) According to Wyatt (1985), he stated four questions to define children sexual abuse during childhood : “In the first 18 years of life, when some of the people had a sexual experience with someone at least 5 years older than them. A relative, stranger, or family friend may have involved in their sexual experiences. During the first 18 years life, if someone ever (1) touches your body sexually, (2) you have touched someone’s body in a sexually, (3) intends to have sexual intercourse with you, or (4) actually experiences sexual intercourse with you. If one of answer from the questions above is ‘yes’, the people will be classified as experiencing children sexually abuse before. While in the different research, as cited in Yuan, Koss & Stone (2006), American Medical Association (1992) defined that children sexual abuse is including contact abuse and non-contact abuse. For examples, force the children to involve in inappropriate sexual activity, pornography, or exhibitionism. Hence, in simple words, children sexual abuse (CSA) is a sexual action that used on children …show more content…
As cited in Dube (2005), Kendall-Tackett, Williams & Finkelhor (1993) state that short term effects are the effects that may occur in children within 2 years. As an effect on physical development, sexual abuse would causes physical injuries to the children. According to Elliot & Briere (1994), the organs of the children have not been fully developed, they would be fragile and could be damaged easily when a high degree of force is applied during sexual abuse. This might causes internal bleeding to the children, thus, causes the damaged organs to not have fully functioned as before. On the other hand, as an effect of mental development, sexual abuse would also affect the mentality of children and function of the brain due to the stress caused by sexual abuse. Sexual abuse might encounter short-term memory impairments from the painful and fearful experience of being abused. (Smith & Segal 2015) As the development is incomplete, it would cause retardation to the children. Moreover, one of short-term effects of sexual abuse on children development is that children would be suffering from emotional problems which would affect their mental development. According to Parker & Turner (2013), most of the children who got sexually abused are usually more depressed, anxious or fear in their daily life, as compared to those who are not. These children will only step out of