- My recollections of that night have somewhat faded with time. And while it is my desire to share the truth, the foggy cloud of traumatic repression may have found its way into this story. With that, I'm not going to tell the story the way it happened. I'm going to tell it the way I remember it. This is my truth.
- I was 12 is the summary experience of one person's child sexual abuse, narrated by multiple characters who have has similar experiences.
The prevalence of child sexual abuse is difficult to determine because it is often not reported; experts agree that the incidence is far greater than what is reported to authorities. CSA is also not uniformly defined, so statistics may vary. Statistics below represent some of the research done on child sexual abuse.
-1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of child sexual abuse; -Self-report studies show that 20% of adult females and 5-10% of adult males recall a childhood sexual assault or sexual abuse incident; -During a one-year period in the U.S., 16% of youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized; -Over the course of their lifetime, 28% of U.S. youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized; -Children are most vulnerable to CSA between the ages of 7 and 13.
According to a 2003 National Institute of Justice report, 3 out of 4 adolescents who have been sexually assaulted were victimized by someone they knew well
In the vast majority of cases where there is credible evidence that a child has been penetrated, only between 5 and 15% of those children will have genital injuries consistent with sexual abuse.
Child sexual abuse is not solely restricted to physical contact; such abuse could include non-contact abuse, such as exposure, voyeurism, and child pornography.
Compared to those with no history of sexual abuse, young males who were sexually abused were five times more likely to cause teen pregnancy, three times more likely to have multiple sexual partners and two times more likely to have unprotected sex.
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