Sexual Abuse is known as the sexual contact that involves psychological coercion or at least one individual who cannot reasonably consent to the contact (e.g. a child). Such abuse includes pedophilia, rape and incest and concerns the society more than any other sexual problem.

Childhood Sexual Abuse:

There seems to be a rising concern over childhood sexual abuse. There are at least three reasons for this:

Firstly, much evidence suggests that childhood sexual abuse is common more than it was once assumed.

Secondly, several mental disorders have been linked to this problem.

Thirdly, some dramatic and well publicized cases involving allegations of this disorder have raised very controversial issues, such as the validity of children’s testimony and recovered memories of sexual abuse.

The prevalence figured of this disorder range from less than 5 percent to more than 30 percent.

Consequences of childhood sexual abuse:

This disorder may have both short term as well as long term consequences. The most common short term consequences include fears, post traumatic stress disorder, sexual inappropriateness and poor self esteem. A number of studies have found associations between reports of childhood sexual abuse and adult psychopathology including borderline personality disorder, somatization disorders, dissociative symptoms chronic pelvic pain and dissociative identity disorder. A wide variety of sexual symptoms have been alleged to result from early sexual abuse ranging from aversion to sex to sexual promiscuity.

Pedophilia:

This is defined as a paraphilia in which an adult’s preferred or exclusive sexual partner is a pre pubertal child. It is important to emphasize that pedophilia is defined by the body maturity and not the age of the preferred partner. Nearly all pedophiles are male and about two thirds of their victims are girls, typically between the ages of 8 and 11.

Pedophilia frequently involves manipulation of the child’s genitals. It used to be thought that sexual penetration was rare, however, one study found that sexual penetration occurred in more than half of cases and that use of physical force or violence occurred in 89 percent.

Incest:

Culturally prohibited sexual relations between family members, such as brother and sister or a parent and child are known as incest. Although, a few societies have approved of incestuous relationships —at one time it was the established practice for Egyptian pharaohs to marry their sisters to prevent the royal blood from being ‘contaminated’. The incest taboo is virtually universal among human societies and this disorder often produces children with mental and physical problems.