INCESTUOUS SEXUAL ABUSE

Statistics

The following are excerpted from The Children We Sacrifice: A Resource Book, edited by Grace Poore, Silver Spring, MD: SHaKTI PRODUCTIONS, 2000. To obtain a copy, contact us.

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According to a study released in 1997 by the Sakshi Violence Intervention Centre, based on a survey done with 350 school girls in New Delhi, India:

• 63% of the girls had experienced child sexual abuse at the hands of family members.
• 25% of the girls had either been raped, forced to masturbate the perpetrator, or forced to perform oral sex.
• early one-third of the girls said the perpetrator had been a father, grandfather or male friend of the family.

In a 1999 report by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, a study done in 1994 and 1995 with 150 minor-age girls in Bombay, India showed:

• 58 of the girls surveyed had been sexually abused before age 10.
• Of this number, 50 had been abused by a family member or friend of the family.

Another study was done in 1997 by RAHI, a Delhi-based organization. This study focused on 1,000 English-speaking middle and upper class women living in Delhi, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and Goa. Majority were graduate and under-graduate students. Findings from this study showed:

• 76% of respondents had been sexually abused as children; 31% of these by someone they knew and 40% by a family member. So 71% had been abused either by relatives or someone they knew and trusted.
• While 48% had been abused by a single abuser, 52% had been abused by two or more abusers - meaning the majority of women had multiple perpetrators.
• Abuse for 11% of the survivors occurred once in their lives while 42% were subjected to the abuse many times at different times of their lives either by the same abuser or different abusers at different times.
• 50% of the abuse took place when the survivors were under 12 years of age, 35% had been abused between 12-16 years of age. The significance of this is that victims were almost always in the care or company of some family member, caretaker or known person.
• 68% of those who had been abused were living in nuclear families, 16% in nuclear families that included grandparents, and 15% in extended families that comprised other relatives.
• 60% said their mothers were housewives and 40% said their mothers were employed outside the home.
• 54% of the survivors had told someone about the abuse compared to 36% who did not.
• Most of those who disclosed did so voluntarily. In a few cases, the abuse was discovered by an older person. 30% told a friend, 26% told their mothers, 12% told a sister, 9% told both parents. Only 2% had been to a therapist or counselor.
• The main reasons given for not telling anyone about the abuse were: wanting to forget it happened (23%), fear of what people would think of them (14%), self-blame for the abuse (11%), and not having anyone to trust (11%). Only 3% did not tell because the abuser had threatened them. Only 1% did not tell because they were bribed by the abuser.
• The overwhelming responses to disclosure of abuse by the victims were: anger at the perpetrator, disbelief in the victim, and denial. The actions that followed most often did not involve confrontation of perpetrator.
• According to the study the most often cited long-lasting effects of the sexual abuse were: lack of self-confidence, inability to express feelings, inability to trust people, feeling angry at the world most of the time. Other effects included: avoiding sex or compulsively seeking it out, experiencing chronic aches and pains, use of drugs and alcohol.

A 1996 study done in Bangalore by Samvada with high school students showed:

• 47% of respondents had been sexually abused; 62% of whom had been raped once and 38% of whom had suffered repeated violations.
• Where vaginal and/or oral penetration were involved, 32% of the girls had been under age. Where abuse did not involve penetration, 13% had been under age 10.
• 64% of those whose abuse involved penetration made total disclosure, 20% made partial disclosure.
• Self blame went up as the "seriousness" of the abuse increased; 37% of those who were molested blamed themselves compared to 50% of those whose abuse involved penetration.
• Where families placed great emphasis on virginity and equated it with purity, virtue and family honor (izzat), the victims felt greater sense of shame, self contempt, anger, and felt compelled to keep quiet about the abuse.
• Many of the respondents who feared the person abusing them continued to feel it at the present time. Those who felt anger wished they could retaliate. Those whose desire for revenge (or justice) did not materialize began feeling helpless.
• Asked what they expected as a result of the abuse, 31% called for prevention; 17% said society needed to talk about sex; 13% said women should fight back compared to 3% who said girl children should learn martial arts; 8% said victim assistance should be available; 14% said abusers should be punished; 1% said abusers should be helped.

A report published in a 1992 issue of Lears Magazine looked at a study of 118 American fathers by sociologists David Finkelhor and Linda Meyer Williams:

• 26% of fathers who sexually abused their daughters said that they were preoccupied with their daughters' physical characteristics - feel of skin and smell of body. Many of these men regarded their daughters as sex objects from birth.
• 33% of fathers in the study became sexually interested in their daughters at puberty and said they were "transfixed by her body's change."
• 20% of respondents said they used their daughters' bodies as "a receptacle" for self-gratification. These 20% abused sporadically, worried about the harm they were causing and felt great guilt. To alleviate their guilt some of these men convinced themselves that their daughters were aroused by the abuse.
• A little over 10% of respondents saw themselves as failures and looked to their daughters for "close, exclusive, emotionally dependent relationships including sexual gratification."
• 10% abused their daughters out of anger at their wives for various reasons - neglecting the husband, leaving husband, prioritizing daughter over husband. Sometimes the daughters were abused because they resembled their mothers. Sometimes fathers wanted to desecrate their daughters or possess them out of angry sense of entitlement.
• 33% of the respondents in the study reported being under the influence of alcohol when they committed the abuse, 10% on drugs, and 9% on both alcohol and drugs to reduce their inhibitions to abuse.
• The average age of the daughters of the men participating in the study was 6-7 years.

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