Understanding Child-On-Child Sexual Abuse

Child sexual abuse is a complex issue with both immediate and long-term consequences for children. Long-term impacts can include eating disorders, substance abuse, and emotional difficulties.

It is essential to understand that sexual touching between two children is not regular and is considered abuse. It is also essential to teach children about body safety and healthy boundaries.

Signs of Child-On-Child Sexual Abuse

While strangers can commit child sexual abuse, it is often perpetrated by people the victim knows – family members, friends, or acquaintances. This could include someone they know from work or a community organization such as a sports team. It can also be someone who has approached them online or over the phone and formed a relationship with them.

The abuse can be non-contact or contact, with both touching and oral sex considered forms of abuse. Abused children may be forced to undress, perform various sexual acts, and be photographed or videotaped.

In the short term, some victims will display various behavioral problems and emotional distress, including aggression, anxiety, and depression. They might experience gastrointestinal issues such as irritable bowel syndrome, bedwetting, sleep disturbances, or excessive sweating. Symptoms like dissociation (a feeling similar to daydreaming where the person feels disconnected from what is happening) and self-mutilation are common.

Causes of Child-On-Child Sexual Abuse

Child-on-child sexual abuse (COCSA) is a form of sexual assault or abuse between two children/young people. It can involve several activities such as sex on demand; groping; oral sex; fondling and rubbing of the genital area; penetration with fingers; simulated intercourse; rape or other forms of sexual violence and exploitation.

Victims of sibling sexual abuse can develop a range of psychological symptoms and impacts. Regressive behaviors (bedwetting in older teens or younger children), depression, eating disorders, substance misuse, subpar academic performance, and a lack of interest in social activities are a few of these. They can also experience various physical problems, including upper respiratory and gastrointestinal disorders, and women may be at risk of gynecological or reproductive health problems.

Research suggests that people who experienced CSA as children/adolescents are at greater risk of being revictimized in later life. They may also find it difficult to trust and have healthy relationships.

Impact of Child-On-Child Sexual Abuse

Child sexual abuse can have long-lasting effects. It can change how victims understand themselves, their relationships with others, and where they belong. This impact can be felt whether the abuse is offline or online, though young people who use technology to commit abuse are less likely to disclose it. The manipulative grooming tactics used by child offenders can cause ongoing thought distortions, self-identity issues, and relational harm. Professionals must understand intersectionality when considering these impacts, recognizing that a person can occupy multiple and overlapping identities and social positions.

Physical signs of abuse can include genital pain, infections, and changes in bowel movements (for example, constipation). In the longer term, victim-survivors may experience sleep problems, addictions, self-mutilating behavior, and various psychological symptoms, such as depression, anxiety, anger, loss of appetite, and withdrawal from activities. They can also find it difficult to trust others and become clingy or over-dependent.

Treatment of Child-On-Child Sexual Abuse

Depending on the severity of any number of traumas they experience, victims can develop long-term problems, including anxiety, depression, and a fear or distrust of adults. Some victims may suffer from dissociation, a psychological state similar to daydreaming, feeling disconnected from their body and surroundings.

The abuse is often sexual and physical, involving touching, groping, penetration, sodomy and rape. It can be committed between boys, girls, or the same sex. It can happen at school, after-school programs, church youth groups, summer camp, sleepaway camp, or within a family.

Many times, a child victim or survivor will be blamed for the abuse and is made to feel like they are in trouble for not stopping it from happening. It is essential to teach children early warning signs and what to do if they are being threatened with a weapon so that the abuse can be stopped before it even starts.