Signs of Sexual Abuse in Children and What to Do About It

The issue of child sexual abuse is so disturbing that it can be tempting to pretend it doesn’t exist. But walk into your local police station and ask to look through the registered sex offender list. This list is a public record, and you will likely be very surprised to find out where registered sex offenders are living in your community.

What does a sexual offender look like?

Sex offenders come from all walks of life. They can be any age, ethnicity, or income level. I’ve worked with both survivors and perpetrators, both children and adults, in several different inpatient and outpatient settings.

Offenders can be children or adults. I’ve worked with offenders who acted out starting at the age of eight. Level 3 offenders are considered to be at the highest risk to commit future offenses, and I’ve seen them as young as 10.

This is why you can’t rely on profiling to tell whether someone is a danger. If your intuition is making you uncomfortable around someone, no matter how old they are, stay away from them.

Signs of Sexual Abuse

Sexual abuse is correlated with specific signs. Here are some I’ve seen in my clinical experience.

[Note: Pay attention to an overall pattern; the signs of abuse will most likely include more than one symptom.]

Changes in behavior

Abuse inevitably results in behavioral changes. In children, you often see some combination of these types of behavior patterns:

• Becoming quiet and withdrawn. If your child is normally talkative and outgoing and suddenly becomes unusually reserved, pay attention.
• Increased fear and anxiety. This is one of the most prevalent signs. Abuse can make a child hypervigilant and constantly alert for signs of danger, especially at bedtime and during the night.

During my time working in a residential treatment facility, I saw that some children would sleep turned away from the door while others were vigilant about locking their bedroom doors and windows. Older abuse survivors would sometimes sleep with a weapon, such as a knife, under their pillow. They felt a real need for protection.

PTSD symptoms

Professionals first noticed the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in military combat veterans. These veterans were experiencing overwhelming stress, anxiety, panic, and fear due to the trauma of combat. Child sexual abuse survivors often display similar disturbances.

Survivors of trauma often feel triggered emotionally by specific stimuli that cause an immediate reaction of stress, anxiety, and panic. Triggers can include anything that reminds them of their abuser or the abuse, including smells, sights, songs, movies, and even people. Panic attacks are a common occurrence.

Sleep disturbances, bad dreams, flashbacks, pervasive memories

Sleep disturbances often occur concurrently with PTSD. A child will seem exhausted due to insomnia, nightmares, or night terrors. They will often experience unexpected flashbacks, which include vivid memories of their abuse. These memories can dominate their thoughts and make concentration difficult, affecting their schoolwork and daily routines. Some children may not be able to think about anything else.

Depression

Depression is a common result of sexual abuse. Suicidal ideas and attempts are often found in abuse survivors, especially if the abuse is frequent, severe, or has continued for a long time. Teenagers may wear dark clothing, have excessive tattoos or piercings, or engage in self-injury.

Crying, tearfulness, or emotional detachment and apathy

Crying easily and excessively is an instinctive response to trauma. But as the child gets older, and especially if the abuse continues, eventually they will become hardened and calloused to it. They may seem numb, with their emotions turned off like water from a faucet. Experiencing the pain of their emotions is too intense, so they shut them down.

This can lead to emotional detachment, feeling as if a different person experienced the abuse. This is often the beginning of a dissociative disorder.

Increased aggression, agitation, and hostility

Abuse can make the whole world seem hostile and scary, making it difficult to trust people, and causing frustrated and angry hair-trigger reactions. A child may be suspicious of new people and feel like they are in constant danger of being harmed.

Because the majority of sex offenders are male, victims often have trouble trusting or liking most males. If they have been abused by a parent, they may feel aggressive and hostile toward the non-abusing parent or other caregivers, wondering why they weren’t protected. This anger may lead to property destruction, yelling, arguing, fights, etc.

Hurt, guilt, and shame

These emotions are quite common in abuse survivors. Children might think the abuse was their fault. Abusers reinforce this idea, blaming the victim and threatening to tell other people or to hurt a child’s loved ones if the child doesn’t comply.

Abusers also try to reframe their victims’ thinking, saying that the child enjoyed the abuse or came up with the idea. This leads to an abused child thinking they are responsible for the entire situation and the behavior of everyone around them.

Frequent enuresis and/or encopresis

Normal toilet training issues aside, bedwetting often crops up as a sign of sexual abuse, even in teenagers. As a standalone issue, one shouldn’t immediately assume abuse, but if bedwetting or other toileting issues are occurring concurrent with other symptoms listed, this would call for further medical investigation, particularly in the case of an older child.

Pain in the genital areas, the anus, or difficulty swallowing

A young child who has these issues presents a major red flag for recent abuse. A doctor should be consulted immediately.

Fear of intimacy and closeness

Child abuse survivors often find it difficult to participate in intimate relationships. They will withdraw their emotions and keep other people at a safe distance. This doesn’t mean they’re inherently shy; they may have an outgoing, fun, and friendly personality, but they are wary of letting people get too close. Their logic is that if no one gets close enough, no one can hurt them.

Aversion to or excessive seeking of intimacy, hugging, touching

Another sign of abuse is a polarized response to physical contact, whether casual or intimate. Some survivors may experience a strong aversion to being hugged or touched, even physically pushing people away. On the other hand, some react to their abuse by becoming physically clingy and needy with other people and displaying a poor sense of social boundaries.

Children who’ve been abused sometimes find it difficult to tell the difference between sexual touch and an appropriate non-sexual display of physical affection. They may interpret even healthy, platonic touch as a signal of someone being “in love” with them, leading them to respond with inappropriate physical contact.

Sexual promiscuity or aversion to sex

Similarly, there’s often a polarized response in regards to consensual sexual activity. A victim of child sexual abuse may become engaged in promiscuity, or conversely desire to avoid sex altogether.

Teenage girls who have been victimized may end up in sexual relationships with their hormonal male counterparts not only because they desire love and attention, but because their abuse has led them to believe that sexual intercourse is synonymous with affection.

According to a study done by the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault (ICASA), 57% of prostitutes reported being sexually abused as children. The fallout of this tragic reality is not limited to females; men who were abused as young children can also be repulsed by sex and physical affection. Even if they get married eventually, they often struggle if they haven’t received help to handle the consequences of their abuse.

Sexual acting out

This category is not referring to normal developmental curiosity or preschool playacting. Also, it’s not out of the ordinary for some school-aged kids, especially boys, to lack social skills and boundaries, leading them to engage in inappropriate public displays.

This behavior is often noticeable in children who’ve been abused. They may become sexually assertive or aggressive, and this becomes quite problematic when they seek to gain power and dominance over others. A child who acts out sexually toward another child is exhibiting behavior that needs to be addressed.

Animal abuse and sadistic cruelty

Children who have been victims of severe abuse sometimes take their pain, bitterness, and anger out on animals, even in brutal, cruel, or bestial ways. This type of behavior needs professional intervention.

Displaying much younger or older behavior

Another sign often noticed in children who have been sexually abused is a lack of social skills appropriate to their age. Many times, they struggle to relate to other children their own age, preferring instead to play with younger children, and acting in young and immature ways themselves. For example, some teenagers I’ve worked with have still been attached to a stuffed animal or baby blanket, or even thumb sucking.

Sometimes, the opposite reaction happens, when a child behaves in a manner far beyond their years, conversing with adults on a similar level, or simply not acting like a child. For example, girls, even as young as six, may want to act like grown women, cosmetics and all.

Advanced level of knowledge about sex

Child abuse survivors may display sexual education that is far beyond their years. A seven-year-old who can explain intimate adult acts in explicit detail is waving a red flag that should initiate an immediate investigation.

Disturbing forms of play

Play is a way for children to process their experiences. If for example, a five-year-old child is having dolls perform sexual acts, this is cause for concern.

Disturbing forms of creative expression

Children also process their feelings and experiences through what they make. As an adult, please take special notice of:

Drawings, paintings, and sculptures

Children who’ve been abused will sometimes create art with dark, aggressive, or disturbing themes. For example, one seven-year-old boy had colored a solid black background behind an ominous dark figure, who had long, red, razor claws, dripping with blood.

Stories, poems, songs, journal entries, or social media

These types of expression are often seen in older kids or teenagers. They may write songs, poems, or stories that directly share their experiences or at least allude to them in some way.

Social media is also a hotbed for this kind of expression, and it may also be a cry for help. A story might be posted or a disturbing picture might be sent. Another cry for help might be found in a journal, left in a place where it might be “accidentally” found and read.

Excessively crude sexualized language

Unfortunately, due to the sexualization of today’s culture, it can be difficult to discern the source of a child’s sexualized language. However, there are extremes; if a five-year-old child curses profusely and his language conveys pornography exposure, there is probably more to the story.

Increased or decreased appetite

Many children who’ve been abused experience changes in appetite and eating habits. They may tend to either undereat or overeat, even to the extent of developing an eating disorder. Starvation, binging, or purging can stem from body dysmorphia arising from the abuse. Constant overeating can also be used as a way to suppress painful emotions.

Power and control issues

Sadly, victims of child abuse usually feel as though their lives are out of their control. They react to this feeling by either being overly compliant, not being assertive, and putting everyone else’s needs and desires ahead of their own (this is frequently seen in youngest born children). Or they might react by being argumentative and trying to gain and maintain control at all costs.

Attention seeking, hint-dropping, and evasiveness

Older children or teenagers who’ve experienced abuse will often seek more attention than anyone else does. They may be afraid to overtly share their pain, but they’ll often drop hints to peers or adults they trust, hoping they’ll feel safe and encouraged to somehow disclose everything.

This overwhelming desire to be noticed, seen, and cared for can suddenly swing the other direction when the child shuts down and evades the concern of friends and caregivers. They may keep secrets and manipulate others to feel a sense of personal control since they feel that they lack power and autonomy over their own lives.

Hygiene issues

Children who’ve been abused frequently neglect basic hygiene. They may allow themselves to be dirty or smell bad as a defense mechanism, hoping they’ll protect themselves by being unpleasant to be around.

Talking about and/or hanging around a much older friend

This isn’t to label all Good Samaritans who want to mentor young people as possible abusers, but we must not kid ourselves; there are wolves among the sheep. If you are a parent, educator, or guardian of children or young people, you need to keep a very close eye on the other people in these children’s lives, both online and off.

Receiving gifts, money, and/or possession of pornography

Grooming is a process by which an abuser desensitizes his victim to his progressively inappropriate attention, and seeks to make the victim willing to participate in sexual acts. Abusers often tell young children, who don’t understand what’s going on or why it’s wrong, that what they’re doing is normal and natural.

Pornography is often involved in the grooming process as a way to make sexual acts seem normal, or to present them as a lifestyle to which the child will become addicted. A child who has received gifts (or worse – has pornography in their possession) from an unknown source, should certainly set off alarm bells.

Alcohol and drug abuse

Just as some abuse victims turn to food to suppress painful emotions, many also use illicit substances to cope with the trauma they’ve endured and to deal with pervasive, disturbing thoughts and feelings.

Running away

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 46% of runaway and homeless youth report having been sexually abused.

Sexual identity confusion or rejection

This symptom is not talked about a lot (for obvious reasons), but it is an important one. It’s not uncommon at all for young people who have experienced childhood sexual abuse to have confusion when it comes to their sexual identity. This topic is often avoided due to political correctness, but sexual identity confusion is a very common sign of abuse.

Females may want to avoid being seen as pretty; they may either believe they’re ugly or be afraid of being beautiful. This may lead to behavior such as wearing short hair, dyeing it wildly, or dressing in unflattering or socially unacceptable ways. They may associate femininity with weakness and vulnerability, adopting a male identity out of a desire to feel safe.

Males may question their masculinity as a result of childhood sexual abuse. They may have experienced confusing responses to their abuse, some of which may have been pleasure physiologically, leading them to question their sexual orientation.

This isn’t a correlation I’ve noted independently. In a recent study, the National Institutes of Health concluded:

“Epidemiological studies find a positive association between childhood maltreatment and same-sex sexuality in adulthood, with lesbians and gay men reporting 1.6 to 4 times greater prevalence of sexual and physical abuse than heterosexuals.”

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3535560/

Warning: If you are seeing unusual signs like these in the children around you, don’t ignore it – report it. Call your local CPS Office or the National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-CHILD.

How Christian Counseling Can Help

Childhood sexual abuse is tragic, devastating, and carries long-term and far-reaching consequences. But if you are a survivor of this kind of abuse, that doesn’t mean you are broken or beyond the reach of healing. Jesus, our Lord and Savior, came to set the captives free (Isaiah 61).

A well-trained Christian counselor can be used as a vessel of Christ to help bring healing and restoration into your life, picking up the broken pieces and allowing God to mold them into something beautiful.