Therapy Notes

What is Sexual Abuse? I often hear people refer to sexual abuse in many different ways. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, the Arizona’s Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (AzATSA)put on a conference in Phoenix, Arizona, with leading trauma and sexual assault expert, Lucy Berliner, MSW, Director of Harborview Center for Sexual Assault & Traumatic Stress. As the president of AzATSA I got to spend some time with Lucy. We were talking about sexual trauma and she told me that she defines sexual abuse as sexual assault. She said that when we refer to children we tend to call it “sexual abuse” but when we refer to adults we tend to define it as “sexual assault”, but why? I thought this was excellent point and it got me to thinking again about how we define sexual abuse.

According to American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Sexual abuse of children refers to sexual behavior between a child and an adult or between two children when one of them is significantly older or uses coercion. The perpetrator and the victim may be of the same or the opposite sex. The sexual behaviors include touching breasts, buttocks, and genitals, whether the victim is undressed or dressed, exhibitionism, fellatio, cunnilingus, and penetration of the vagina or anus with sexual organs or objects. Exposure to pornographic material is also sexually abusive to children. It is important to consider developmental factors in assessing whether sexual behavior between two children is abusive or normative.

But there are many forms of sexual abuse. According to a national expert on sexual abuse, Adena Bank Lees, LCSW, covert sexual abuse is

The process where a child is used to meet the emotional sexual needs of a trusted adult authority figure or other person, i.e., surrogate spouse, emotional mistress, voyeured, exhibited in front of, witness/spectator of someone else’s sexual violation, exposed to pornography.

And according to Wikipedia

Child sexual abuse is a form of child abuse in which a child is abused for the sexual gratification of an adult or older adolescent. In addition to direct sexual contact, child sexual abuse also occurs when an adult indecently exposes their genitalia to a child, asks or pressures a child to engage in sexual activities, displays pornography to a child, or uses a child to produce child pornography.

And according to Rape Abuse Incest National Network (RAINN), www.rainn.org they list over fifteen different definitions of sexual assault, rape and sexual violence. They define sexual assault as

unwanted sexual contact that stops short of rape or attempted rape. This includes sexual touching and fondling.

RAINN states that rape is

forced sexual intercourse, including vaginal, anal, or oral penetration. Penetration may be by a body part or an object.

RAINN does an excellent job of sorting through definitions and assisting people in understanding sexual trauma. There are also legal definitions of sexual abuse and assault which may vary from state to state.

What is clear is that we may never have one definition of sexual abuse. I think many of us who are working in the field of sexual abuse, prevention and treatment are beginning to refer to it as sexual trauma, which is another topic all together…