Preventing child sex abuse

Revelations of widespread sexual assault against minors spark public debate

Public anxiety reached a crescendo over the past three weeks over the incident of a 14-year-old girl surnamed Jiao, who was taken to a nondescript hotel in Banjiudian, Shandong province in December last year, where she had sex with four men.

Jiao reported to authorities that she had been gang-raped, but an investigation by police from the city of Taian concluded that she had consented to the sexual acts. Amid public accusations of collusion between local police and the four men, Jiao's mother, surnamed Kang, tried to kill herself by ingesting pesticide.

The Beijing News reported earlier this month that the alleged rape was just one of a number of sexual assaults committed against girls in Banjiudian aged between 11 and 15 over the past several years. The incident with Jiao also involved another girl, who was aged 13 at the time.

News coverage of the alleged rapes have sparked a public furore in China, with much of the debate centered around how to best protect minors from sexual molestation and assault.

Deafening silence

According to China Youth Daily, only 125 child sexual assault cases were reported last year in China, with most of the victims falling between the ages of 8 and 14. In a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, this number seems improbably low, suggesting that the vast majority of sexual assault cases against children go unreported, said Wang Dawei, a professor of criminology at the Chinese People's Public Security University.

"The actual number of incidents of child sexual assault is about seven times the number reported," said Wang. "For every case that is reported, there are seven others that remain undiscovered in this country."

Wang said that the university had conducted a survey canvassing 5,800 primary school students from all across China. The findings, which were published in a Xinhua News Agency report, showed that 41 percent of the children surveyed had suffered some sort of abuse, from mental and physical harassment, to violations of a sexual nature.

The findings are consistent with rates of abuse around the world as indicated in psychologist Li Chunman's book, How To Prevent Child Sexual Assault, released earlier this month.

Li's book suggests that one in every 10 children suffer from some form of sexual abuse.

"Many readers are stunned by this number," said Li.

"But there are different kinds of sexual assault, some of which might ordinarily be considered less serious, such as being shown pornography, or being talked to in a sexually inappropriate way. These kinds of abuse can be very difficult to discover and prove."

Lifelong trauma

Children who have been sexually abused will seldom volunteer to talk about the experience, especially during the initial period when the abuse has just occurred, according to Li. Often, the fact that something is not quite right can only be detected by the fact that a child is behaving unusually. The longer the period between the sexual assault occurring and the discovery by caregivers that an assault has taken place, says Li, the more likely it is that the assault will cast a shadow over the rest of the victim's life and lead to ongoing trauma.

Wang Linghua, a psychologist at Guangzhou Children's Hospital, said in a 2008 Guangzhou Daily report that the negative long-term consequences of child sexual abuse can be difficult to treat.

One of the patients Wang had was a 10-year-old boy, who could not stop touching his genitals, even when he was in public. The problem had been ongoing for three years when his parents finally took him to the hospital. After treating him, Wang discovered that the child's behavior was linked to a sexual assault that occurred three years earlier, committed against the boy by a young man in his twenties.

Besides leading to abnormal behavior, said Wang, child sexual abuse can have a lasting impact on a person's adult life, such as being fearful of having sex or having an irrational hatred of people of the opposite sex, affecting the person's ability to have long-term relationships.

The Guangzhou Daily report also suggested that being a victim of child sexual assault may be correlated to perpetrating acts of sexual abuse in later life. A survey of 843 sexual offenders in the UK found that 21 percent of them had themselves been sexually abused as children.