SUPPORT FOR THE SEXUALLY ABUSED CHILDREN
What is sexual abuse?
Every sexual act between adult and minor or between minors, if one of the minors is using force and compulsion over the other.
Violence, compulsion or persuasion of a child to take part in whatever sexual act. This is including a sexual intercourse, but also other actions without contact like exhibitionism, voyeurism, pornography, sexual communication through the telephone or internet.
The biggest risk for the children comes not from unknown people, but from familiar people.
34% from the abusers are family members.
59% are people who the family trusts – often the abusers try to build trust in them by the parents
Big part of the children are victims of older children.
The people who abuse children, look and behave like all the other people. Often they are trying to build trust in order to get access to children.
Often the abusers are orientating themselves to places where they can be in contact with the children. Such like sport clubs, interest clubs, schools and so on..
93% of all victims know their abusers
In the last years we witness worrying tendencies for increasing of the cases of sexual abuse of children. The biggest group is between 14 and 18 years old /48%/, the ones between 7-13 years /33%/ and these between
2-6 years /19%/.
The analysis shows that the children who are raised by two parents are mostly physically abused and neglected. The children raised by one parent – mostly the mother, are in bigger risk of sexual abuse. The experts think, that the signals for children abused in the family are not many because of the complicated emotional relationships and the children` s dependence of their parents.
The European statistics shows that:
- Between ¼ and 1/3 from all the girls have had an episode of sexual abuse with adult man;
- About 1% are victims of incest by their fathers
It is important to say that mostly the children, victims of sexual abuse can not say what is happening with them, what are they going through, because they get constant threats by their abuser. Victims of sexual abuse can be not only little children, but also babies. They are in a condition to express suffering in different ways. Their messages for help can be:
- Refusing to eat and communicate.
- Enuresis(bed wetting).
- Sexual gestures or gestures reminding of masturbation.
- Sexual gestures towards other children.
- Pictures with symbolic represented sexual scenes.
- Runaway from home.
- Nightmares.
- Sleeping in class.
- Decreasing of the progress in school.
To be able to talk about the problem it is necessary to have someone who would listen to him/her and would be ready to hear the unbearable. To start talking about the abuse is needed lots of bravery and mobilization. The child must break the law of the abuser and to overcome the threats even the fear from death. In the same moment the child takes the risk not to be heard or not to be believed to. In case this happens very often. That is why if a child takes the risk to talk, you shouldn’t think that it makes it to get your attention. The child tells the through in 90 % of the cases.
According to the law for child protection, every human is obligated to give a signal if he/she knows about sexual or other type of abuse of child. The law for child protection is based on the fact that every child must be protected from all kinds of violence including sexual abuse.