Who's Most at Risk for Sexual Assault?

After writing my previous post, I began thinking about the hidden epidemic of sexual abuse and assault, that has been going on for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years. It's not happening on college campuses. It's happening in people's homes. The time period of life when people are at highest risk for being sexually abused or raped is before the age of 18. The most common perpetrators of sexual abuse and assault are parents.

For official statistics on child abuse, the federal government is the best source:
https://www.childwelfare.gov/can/statistics/stat_sexAbuse.cfm

According to government statistics, child abuse is in decline. However, it is difficult and perhaps impossible to gain accurate statistics on child sexual abuse, because many of these cases never come to the attention of authorities.

A large percentage--although not the majority--of patients I've seen over the past 13 years in private practice were sexually abused as children. Many of them have been men. Altogether they far outnumber the patients I've seen who have been raped in adulthood.

Seemingly paradoxically, people who were sexually abused in childhood are at higher risk for being raped in adulthood, probably for a variety of reasons. They may be more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, putting them at higher risk. They may have low self-esteem and poor self-care--rapists target such individuals. Some who were sexually abused by parents may have difficulty picking up on warning signs, because they are used to being in an environment of constant danger and/or abuse--they don't identify perpetrators as people to avoid because they are used to being in the company of similar individuals.

Society was in denial about the prevalence of child sexual abuse for a very long time. When Sigmund Freud began investigating the phenomenon of "hysteria" among women approximately 100 years ago, he came across evidence of widespread sexual abuse. He suppressed this information because he didn't think anyone would believe it and he was afraid controversy would distract from his theories about the unconscious and the development of human personality. This was a grave ethical mistake that led to disastrous trends in the field of psychoanalysis. In the early 1980s, a psychoanalytic researcher named Jeffrey Masson discovered that Freud had deliberately suppressed evidence of child sexual abuse. He wrote a book, "The Assault on Truth." Sadly, what happened next was a national panic about child sexual abuse in which many innocent people were persecuted. The most famous case involved a preschool in which it was alleged that there was an organized child sex abuse ring. After extensive investigations and prosecutions, the allegations were determined to be bogus and to have been essentially manufactured by police and prosecutors who asked young children leading questions.

 It's interesting how society has a tendency to swing between extremes of denial and panic when it comes to the issues of rape and sexual abuse.