Confinement and sexual abuse

Confinement aggravates sexual abuse occurring within the family, and victims suffer it without knowing where and whom to ask for help. The aim of this article is to shed light on a reality that is present today and to provide information to learn how to manage this situation and seek help.

What stops a victim of sexual abuse from reporting the facts and asking for help?

A complex question, the answer to which is related to several aspects, although they all revolve around emotions such as fear and shame. If we talk about sexual abuse in the family, we understand that we are talking about child abuse, since there are also sexual assaults and rapes of adults within the family. In the case of minors, the very age of the child hinders the possibility of denouncing and asking for help. Fear of not being believed, fear of reprisals, fear of harming the family, fear of loss of attachment, explicit or veiled threats from the aggressor, among other undefined fears.

Do they tend to be open or, on the contrary, do they withdraw into themselves and find it difficult to explain?

Sexual abuse is something that is experienced in a very painful intimacy, in fact the pain can be so severe that the experiences become dissociated, so that many symptoms that develop, either in the course of the abuse or in adult life, are not only psychological or emotional, but also include a wide variety of physical symptoms that originate from the stress that the abuse is or was. It is nothing strange, the experience of abuse, like any experience is lived in the body. If we are talking about adults abused in childhood, they may not even remember those episodes.

Is there a victim profile?

Children are, by definition, potential victims of a sexual offender. They are small, vulnerable, immature, innocent. If an adult intends to harm them, he or she has a thousand ways to lure them. From my point of view, talking about profiles in the case of victims helps very little, it is rather a stigma that does not contribute anything, it categorizes unnecessarily and can provide very wrong information. For example, one may think that such horrendous things can only happen in families with scarce resources and little education. That is simply a big lie.

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How do situations of sexual abuse in childhood or adolescence affect later in life?

The emotional world of an abused child is devastated, because suddenly everything revolves around very discouraging emotions. Shame is linked to the contents of the abuse, to the social fear of being judged and, above all, to the body’s own physiological reactions to, for example, the helplessness produced by the abuse and the devaluation of personal integrity suffered by the assaulted minor. Abuse, in general and sexual abuse in particular, radically changes the inner world of a minor, affecting his joy, his relationships, his relationship with his body, the way he feels reality, his whole developing being, in short.

Why is it that there are victims of abuse who believe they have forgotten the experience but, nevertheless, they are still under the effects that this type of experience provokes in the human mind?

This phenomenon is called dissociative amnesia. Dissociation, which can occur in various forms, not only in the form of lack of memory, is much more common than one might think. This phenomenon of “forgetting” is involuntary and has to do with how the aggression has been processed. The body has ancient survival mechanisms that prevent full awareness of acts that pose a danger to personal integrity, as in the case of sexual abuse. Another thing is that the abuse has been experienced and the body has a record of it. A person may not remember sexual abuse in childhood, but in the present, in the face of a sexual relationship, for example, he/she may have physical reactions that he/she does not understand, because that memory is dissociated. It can also happen that this sensation suddenly brings back the memory.

What type of therapy or program is applied to the victim of sexual abuse to help him/her overcome the trauma?

EMDR therapy is one of the therapies of choice according to the WHO to work with any type of trauma. Also with dissociative phenomena. Sensorimotor therapy is also a therapy indicated to work with sexual abuse. There are other types of interventions that help to understand, to accept, but it is also possible to free oneself from the bonds of trauma, for that verbal therapies are usually not enough and interventions are needed that are focused or that incorporate body work, as is the case of our therapies.