Children's disclosures of sexual abuse in a population-based sample

"A representative sample of 11,364 sixth and ninth graders participated in the Finnish Child Victim Survey concerning experiences of violence, including CSA. CSA was defined as having sexual experiences with a person at least five years older at the time of the experience. Within this sample, the CSA prevalence was 2.4%." [...]

"Of the total sample of 11,364 children, 2.4% (n = 256) reported having had sexual experiences with someone at least five years older. Of these, 45% reported having had a single experience, and 20% reported it happened from two to 10 times; 13% had had more than 10 CSA experiences (missing data: 22%, n =55). Most of the children who reported CSA experiences were ninth graders (87%) and girls (79%). The median age of the victim at the time of the experience was 14 years, of the perpetrator 23 years." [...]

"Only 16% (n = 35) of the children who reported having sexual experiences with a person at least five years older assessed the experience as constituting sexual abuse. A little over half of the respondents (51%) had not experienced the incident as sexual abuse. On the other hand, a considerable proportion of the children were not sure or did not know (33%) how to describe the experience. Sixth graders labeled the experience as sexual abuse or were uncertain how to label it more often than ninth graders (χ2 (1) = 3.89, p= 0.049). No statistically significant difference was found between the boys and the girls in self-labeling the experience (χ2 (1) =3.35, p = 0.067)." [...]

"Boys and girls showed statistically significant differences in evaluating the experience. For the boys, the experience was often positive (71%), whereas only 26% of the girls evaluated the experience as positive. Almost half of the girls (46%) evaluated the experience as negative, compared to 9% of the boys evaluating the experience as negative (χ2 (2) = 27.12, p ≪ 0.001). Of all the children who had sexual experiences with a person at least five years older, 34% evaluated the experience as positive and 27% as insignificant, whereas 40% of the experiences were evaluated as negative. No statistically significant difference in evaluating the experience was found between sixth and ninth graders. Thirteen percent of the respondents reported that the perpetrator used violence, boys (28%) more than girls (9%) (χ2 (1) =12.07, p ≪ 0.01). Force, intimidation, or blackmail was reported in 20% of the CSA experiences.

In 35% of the cases, the perpetrator was unfamiliar to a child; however, 14% of the children reported the perpetrator as being a friend and 16% as someone whom they knew, but not a friend, and 8% identified the perpetrator as a romantic partner. Intra-familial CSA was rather uncommon in the sample: 6% (n= 15) of the children reporting sexual experiences with a person at least five years older (n = 256) stated that the other person was father, mother, brother, grandparent, or uncle/aunt (0.1% of the total sample of 11,364)."

source: Research 'Children's disclosures of sexual abuse in a population-based sample' by Hanna-Mari Lahtinen, Aarno Laitila, Julia Korkman & Noora Ellonen; www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0145213417304052; Child Abuse & Neglect, Volume 76, February 2018, Pages 84-94; Text copied from website: November 2017