Essay On Childhood Sexual Assault

Childhood sexual assault has always been an incredibly difficult topic to speak of. At such a tender age, it is devastating to imagine the pain, the memories, and the betrayal that all of these innocent children went through. Although it is hard, it is incredibly important to speak of such events. A few courageous women decided to speak of their stories and past experiences and how it has affected their adult lives. All of the women in this article had one thing in common; they were sexually abused by someone when they were children. Most were sexually abused by someone in their family. This sexual abuse soon caused the victims to rely on food. This reliance on food was a defense mechanism to try and desexualize their bodies. The victims wanted to avoid giving their body sexual attention, so, by gaining weight, they believed the harassment would cease. Although some of the women struggled with obesity, others struggled with other forms of illnesses, such as bulimia and anorexia. Little did they know that studies have recently found a correlation between childhood sexual abuse and adulthood obesity.

When interviewing some of his patients who partook in his program, he found that 55% of them had experienced some form of sexual assault as a child. So, to find more evidence of this phenomena, he teamed up with Robert Anda from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Together, they would run the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. The study generated an ACE score, a sum of all of the possible types of traumas that a child could experience. The more traumas a person experienced as a child, the higher the score and vice versa. Felitti’s results showed that those who experienced more traumas in their childhood were more likely to suffer from detrimental events in adulthood, such as abusing drugs or clinical