HealthDay News has an article regarding some statistics about sexual abuse:
THURSDAY, May 19 (HealthDay News) -- One in six adult men reported being sexually molested as children, and -- in a surprise finding -- nearly 40 percent of the perpetrators were female, a new study found.
Women fared even worse, with one in four reporting childhood molestation, in almost all cases perpetrated by males.
Both male and female victims had higher rates of substance abuse, mental illness and troubled marriages.
The findings are contained in a study of more than 17,000 California residents that appears in the June issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
"Children of both genders are vulnerable to childhood sexual abuse," said study lead author Shanta Dube, an epidemiologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "And the long-term effects are similar, regardless of the gender of the victim."
Child molestation has been in the public eye since the 1970s. But much of the focus has been on female victims because awareness of the problem first sprang from the women's movement and rape-crisis centers, explained Kathleen Kendall-Tackett, a research associate professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire who has studied child sex abuse.
Consequently, the treatment of the health effects of childhood abuse also focused on women. "I don't think they were trying to exclude men, it's just that so many of the patients were women," she said.
In the last few years, the Catholic Church abuse scandal has focused more attention on males who were molested as children. But studies of male sexual abuse have tended to focus on those men who have sought psychological help, Dube said.
Read more here.
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