Victims of Violence - Protecting Children from Sexual Abuse - 5 views
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Anna Banana on 13 Jul 11I am very happy to see that the age of consent and power has changed to reflect that even young children can sexually abuse. Any kind of sexual act without consent is rape, no matter the age.
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It is a criminal offence in Canada under section 150.1 to engage in sexual activity with a child under the age of sixteen, regardless of the child’s perceived or actual consent.
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If a person touches a child directly or indirectly “for a sexual purpose” they can be charged and convicted of Sexual Interference under section 151.
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If a person asks a child to touch them directly or indirectly “for a sexual purpose” they can be charged and convicted with Invitation to Sexual Touching under section 152.
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According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, pedophilia is a paraphilia in which an individual has intense and recurring sexual urges towards prepubescent children
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there are basically two groups [of pedophiles]: those oriented exclusively toward children and those oriented toward both adults and children.” Thus, there are two main categories of pedophiles; the first category consists of Preferential Pedophiles, who like children of a certain age group and tend not to stray from that. The second category consists of Situational Pedophiles, who are often incapable of forming relationships with an equal (adult), sometimes because of a mental disability. The Situational Pedophile may turn to children after experiencing humiliation or frustration in an adult relationship.
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large percentage of individuals who suffer from pedophilia were sexually abused as children. However, the vast majority of adults who were abused as children do not develop pedophilia or pedophilic behaviours
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Younger children may not display signs of being harmed by sexual abuse because often the perpetrator is a person they know and trust; the child may seem unaffected by the perpetrators actions and may not show signs of resistance. However, this does not mean that the child has not been harmed by the sexual abuse. The lack of resistance children sometimes show also contributes to their feelings of guilt and their fear of disclosing because they do not want others to assume they “invited” the incident. Disclosure of sexual abuse varies. Some children disclose their abuse immediately, while some are unable to due to their feelings of fear, shame, guilt and confusion.
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My wish is that each survivor will one day be able to give all the guilt and shame back to the perpetrator so that they can heal and live a healthy happy life.
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My wish is that each survivor will one day be able to give all the guilt and shame back to the perpetrator so that they can heal and live a healthy happy life.
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the tendency to sexually assault children begins with a predictable circumstance or pattern of behaviour called a "trigger”
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The best method of prevention is for the offender to abstain from contact with children until treatment is initiated and a clinical risk assessment is made.
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95% of abusers know their victims. These people can be someone in our family, our doctor, our coaches, our troop leaders, our clergy, our teachers. This means that as parents we need to be more vigilant and ask questions about those who are in our childrens lives. Keep your eyes and ears open, listen to your child when they are talking to you as they often insert warnings into their conversations with us to test how we will react.
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Research has shown that these negative consequences most often include anxiety, refusal to eat, nightmares, anger, fear of adults and authority figures, chronic stress, posttraumatic stress disorder, drug abuse, inappropriate sexual and self-destructive behaviour, increased risk of victimization, delinquency, depression, suicide, and the inability to trust and have intimate relationships
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Many factors can influence a victim’s response to their abuse including being believed, the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator, the duration of the abuse, personal support resources (emotional, financial), cultural factors, age and maturity of the victim, degree to which the victim feels responsible for the incident, life stressors, and time between the abuse and the beginning of therapy.
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Psychologist Frederick Mathews’ research on child molesters, “Help for Adults Who Molest Children,” is written for individuals who sexually abuse children. The literature emphasizes that individuals who have molested a child must immediately receive help to decrease their chance of reoffending. Mathews stresses that child molesters are not likely to stop sexually victimizing children on their own, intervention is required. It is important that child molesters ask for help so that they can learn to understand why they commit these crimes, the sexual assault cycle and their triggers. There is not a quick fix to this problem, it requires a lifetime of work and treatment.
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Protection of children from this harmful crime and its life-long negative effects must be a primary goal.
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In 2001, Researchers at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine and University College London reviewed the case notes of 225 male sex abusers and 522 other male patients being treated in a London clinic. The study found that the child abusers had been victims of sexual violence more often than the patients who had not committed sexual abuse. This finding suggests that there is a victim-to-perpetrator cycle in some men who commit sex crimes. Psychoanalytic theory proposes that a hostile childhood can create a need to replace feelings of “defeat” with those of “triumph.” For an individual to accomplish this emotional shift they may become a sexual aggressor as an adult.