John Jacob Mundukottackal
Agape Mental Health and Research Institute, India
Title: Impact of child sexual abuse on mental health correlates among adolescent girls
Biography
Biography: John Jacob Mundukottackal
Abstract
Child sexual abuse is a universal problem that occurs across gender, caste, color, religion, socio-economic group. Sexual abuse creates intense trauma and emotional problems which create serious short term and long term psychological and behavioral problems. 81.53% of the total incidence of child sexual abuse was reported amongst children between 11 and 18 years of age. The pre-adolescent to the adolescent child seems to be most at risk. Child sexual abuse could have a severe impact on the different aspects of mental as depression, stress tolerance, emotional intelligence, resilience, self-esteem and psychological well-being. The present study is to find the impact of sexual abuse on mental health correlates among adolescent girls. For thisstudy, a sample of 177 adolescent girls aged 12-18 two districts of Kerala, State of India was studied. 57 sexually abused girls from Government children’s home, 66 destitute home and 54 with parents. These groups match in terms of socio-economic status and age. Instruments used for this study are Beck’s (1961) Beck’s Depression Inventory, Reshmy’s and Raj’s (1999) Stress Tolerance Scale, Thomas’s and Sushma’s (2003) Emotional Intelligence Inventory, Smith’s (2008) Brief Resilience, Dhar’s and Dhar’s (2015) Self-Esteem Scale and Sisodia’s and Choudhary’s (2012) Psychological Well-being Scale. Data were analyzed using One-Way ANOVA and Post Hoc Test. there is a significant difference between the three groups in the six variables under study. Sexually abused girls show a moderate level of depression while the other two groups show mild depression. All the three groups show moderate stress level but the sexually abused children are comparatively low. The emotional intelligence abused children in the non-abused institutionalized children. Sexually abused children have low resilience, low two groups. Thus, this study implies severe negative impact of sexual abuse on the mental health and their correlates discussed.