Sexual Abuse of Children…(Part 3: The Victim)

Very few people realise how severely Sexual Abuse scars its victims. This is the last part of this article. I will be throwing some light on how deeply this heinous crime affects the lives of the children who go through it.

Imagine a 7-year old boy being sodomized by a 30-year old man, bleeding and writhing in pain. If you think that is the worst thing a little boy could go through, you're mistaken. What's worse than the abuse itself is having to live with it.

It changes people.

And I am not talking just about the victims of violent sexual abuse like I described. Even milder forms of abuse leave their mark. We’re talking about little impressionable children here. Subjecting them to an intrusion of their privacy, coaxing them to cooperate with acts of perversion affects them in hundreds of little ways. It goes on to leave indelible dents on their personalities when they grown up.

Don’t believe me? Read on.

In the previous part of this article, I described how varied these episodes of sexual abuse can be. Ranging from violent sodomy to mere inappropriate touching. Sometimes, when the abuse starts, the kids are too little to understand what's going on and it continues for years, till they realise whats happening. And by that time, a sort of Stockholm Syndrome sets in.

No, they don’t get attached to it or start liking it. They start trying to convince themselves that they are cooperating and enjoying it. Its a coping mechanism. It makes them feel like less of a victim at that moment. But the whole thing will haunt them forever.

Victims of childhood sexual abuse face various effects as they grow up. Low self-esteem, general distrust of people, irrational fears, chronic depression, eternal guilt, self-loathing, careless promiscuity, confused sexual identity, to name a few. These effects go on to harm their relationships, their careers, and their lives in general.

For example, my traumatic experiences at the age of 8, left me incapable of forming strong friendships with men. Physical proximity with men makes me very uncomfortable, unnaturally so.

In other instances, I know about people who never got married due to having developed a complete disgust towards intimacy with the opposite sex. I have heard about people developing a fetish for being forced. I knew this girl once, who had been driven borderline insane by sexually abusive relatives. She kept getting attached emotionally to anyone who talked to her politely. She’d start following them around until they asked her to stay away.

These are just some examples I know about, and I haven't really met a lot of people. So many horrendous things happen to children all over the world. There's no way to know how much damage those inflict upon the victims.

So it is important to understand the sensitivity of this matter and be vigilant towards such acts around us. Coz such acts start a chain of damage. So much so that a lot of us are in some way or another affected by it. It is cruel to subject little hearts to such torture. I hope it stops somewhere.