Do you think sexual abuse happens a lot in Ireland?

lemonbuddy

I started a thread in Personal issues about being abused as a kid/teenager at the weekend.
I was doing a bit of research on this over the years and it generally varies from 1 in 6 males to 1 in 4 females or 1 in 4 in general. Do ye believe this figures are accurate or do you believe they are off?

murphthesmurf

Must have taken a lot of balls for you to post about it on here. A terrible thing to happen to someone.
I don't think it would be as high as 1 in 4 personally. But that would just be a personal opinion based on no evidence at all. My thinking is that of all the friends I have/had have both here and in England to my knowledge none of them have ever been a victim of anything like this. Figures like that would imply that if you walk into any classroom in the country with 30 kids in, at least 6 of them have/are/will be abused. Seems unlikely to me.
However historically in some of the religious institutions, 1 in 4 would be a very low estimate.

gifted

I don't think it happens as much as past times....reckon mental abuse is much more prevalent


Of course I could be wrong, who knows what goes on behind doors.

Zubeneschamali

Tommy Cooper: "Apparently, one in five people is Chinese. There are 5 people in my family, so one of them must be. It's not me, so it's either my Mum or my Dad, or my older brother Colin, or my younger brother Ho Cha Chu.

I think it's Colin."

pilly

Where did the group 1 in 4 get it's name from? Was it 1 in 4 have been abused in general or 1 in 4 who attended religious schools? I'm not sure.

Anyway, I like to think that the figure has gotten a lot less.

The_Kew_Tour

I actually think it does sadly. I'm only basing it off personal Friends and relationships I have had where they told me they have been sexually abused.

But again it's not exactly a huge sample size or anything. Just from what they told me, but I could believe the 1 in 4 figure even though in reality it does seem way too high.

Grayson

I don't think there's as much institutional abuse but as for any other type, I honestly don't know.

Grayson

The_Kew_Tour wrote: »

I actually think it does sadly. I'm only basing it off personal Friends and relationships I have had where they told me they have been sexually abused.

But again it's not exactly a huge sample size or anything. Just from what they told me, but I could believe the 1 in 4 figure even though in reality it does seem way too high.

I've heard 1 in 4 before. But It's in terms of a lifetime. 1 in 4 will be sexually abused/assaulted during the course of their lifetime.

notsoyoungwan

From my experience as a psychiatrist dealing with people with a history of abuse, sadly I'd say those figures are quite accurate.

Sleepy

The 1 in 4 figure is total bull**** perpetuated by the feminazis in US College Campuses who don't know the meaning of the words "research methodology" and it has been thoroughly, thoroughly debunked.

I do suspect that Ireland has a horrible historical record of child abuse, even outside of the state / religious institutions based purely on the high number of victims I know of personally but nowhere near the 15-25% certain lobby groups would like us to believe (so we'll fund their ideologically driven "charities"). I would, however, be extremely surprised if we were particularly bad for it in modern Ireland though, in fact, I suspect we'd have quite a good record on this when looked at in comparison to international standards.

A Little Pony

Ask Gerry Adams.

julyjane

I think it's definitely more common than what's reported unfortunately. And one would hope that with all the child protection laws nowadays that it can be stamped out but abuse thrives on secrecy so it's hard to know.

I was never sexually abused myself. My parents dished out far more physical and mental abuse than we deserved alright but as we got older we gave as good as we got. From different things I've heard people say lately about "things that happened" and references to having attended rape clinics when they were children makes me wonder if sex abuse was actually rampant. A friend confided in me recently about a horrific and prolonged act that was carried out on him at the age of 6 by a client of his family's business. He never told anyone but it changed him as a child and he started acting out and things like bedwetting resulted in regular beatings and humiliation from his mother that still affects him 30 years later.

Celebrities who have spoken out about being sexually abused as children include Christy Dignam and Mary Coughlan. When I watched Christys documentary I hoped my friend wasn't watching because the stories are so similar it was surely triggering. But Christy identified that as the point where everything changed for him. And as a consequence his entire family and his band. In Mary Coughlans autobiography, she also identified being sexually abused as the point in which her childhood was lost. I can't imagine how horrific it must have been, in a country that didn't talk about sex to have such awful things happening that they couldn't tell anyone about, they probably couldn't even find the words.

suicide_circus

super_furry

Why would you disbelieve the figures unless there's evidence to the contrary?

Ragnar Lothbrok

Hopefully now that this terrible subject is much more openly discussed than ever before, the figures quoted will fall dramatically.

It is apparent that in the past the victims of abuse were far more likely to keep the abuse secret. This was due to many factors, not least being that sex in general in Ireland was not seen as a suitable subject for discussion. Those who did have the strength of personality to report their abuser were often ignored, or even worse, considered in some way to be the "sinner" themselves and punished by being incarcerated in state or religious institutions.

I find it hard to believe that 1 in 4 of today's children are being sexually abused, although I have no way of backing up my gut instinct. Whatever the figure is, at least those unfortunate to suffer such abuse now surely have many more support systems and protection available than at any period in the past.

mahamageehad

Pretty sure that the 1 in 4 figure is over the course of your lifetime. Also depends on your definition of sexual abuse. Either way one would imagine that it's difficult to get exact figures as child sexual abuse is likely severely underreported.

lemonbuddy

I honestly don't know how accurate the figures are to be . When you honest when you do think of it tough you just wonder who else it might have happened to.

Benjamin Buttons

fatknacker wrote: »

Where's your 1 in 1000 figure coming from?

He pulled that figure out of his fundament.

The Backwards Man

It's a hell of a lot closer to 1 in 4 than 1 in 1000 anyway, that's for damn sure.

lemonbuddy

This is the thread I started if anybody is interested.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057785471

julyjane

I would have said nothing shocked me anymore either but a few weeks ago there was a report on drive time about a (now) well known case of a basketball coach in Waterford. The things he did to those boys were awful, and there were likely more that couldn't come forward. He abused so many of them and got away with it for years.

If you know one person who was abused as a child, likely chances are the abuser didn't stop at that one child.

scopper

Studies by David Finkelhor, Director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, show that:

1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of child sexual abuse;
Self-report studies show that 20% of adult females and 5-10% of adult males recall a childhood sexual assault or sexual abuse incident;
During a one-year period in the U.S., 16% of youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized;
Over the course of their lifetime, 28% of U.S. youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized;
Children are most vulnerable to CSA between the ages of 7 and 13.

This sounds closer to me. It would tally to the women and men who have told me about being abused. I can certainly accept that 20% of women have been abused. Just from the stories women have told me over the years.

scopper

The UK gov puts it close to those numbers: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160106113426tf_/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/crime-stats/an-overview-of-sexual-offending-in-england---wales/december-2012/index.html

lazybones32

It depends on what the definition of sexual abuse is. Having your @rse pinched could be classed as sexual abuse/assault, so yeah, i reckon 25% would be a conservative number. By those standards, i have both abused and been abused.

I think the 1 in 4 actually came from the States. I remember being shown a college campaign saying that 1 in 4 will be abused/raped. Their system is totally fcuked up in how they approach it but there definitely is an issue on certain campuses.

On a yahoo board some years back, an Australian user posted a leaflet of a talk that was given to primary-school girls. The talk was about abuse and it was a feminist group who gave it. The boys left the class for the talk and the cailini were informed that someone raising their voice to them was abusing them.

MilesMorales1

I was sexually abused in the UK growing up, by two separate people (one I'm not willing to disclose, but the other was a catholic priest) and it wasn't until years later I discovered he'd done it to lots of other kids. He used to organise 'camping' trips to the Yorkshire dales and... yeah. So like someone else said, it doesn't stop at one.

ShowMeTheCash

I think we need to know what we are talking about before we fire everything in the same category.

Assault and sexual assault seem to get conflated.
Then when it comes to studies we need to know what the study shows not just the headline.

The 1 in 4 is something that seem to come out of the US, the idea that 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 females have been sexually abused or raped.
The word "rape culture" has also been used.

The number I think came from the National Intimate Partner and sexual violence survey in the USA in 2011 by the CDC.

However you need to look at how the CDC came up with this number.
In this particular study the number was comprised via phone surveys.
They did not ask if people had they been sexually assaulted or raped out right, they asked questions like "Have you ever had sex whist drunk or inebriated" and questions like "Has anyone ever pressured you into sex by telling you lies" Or "Made false promises about the future that they knew where not true"

A married couple having sex after a night on the sauce in this survey would mark it as a rape.

Any form of chat up lines could be considered sexual assault.

HalloweenJack

I think there's a lot more of it that goes on then that which actually gets out.

It's very easy to say that you know if you're friends have been or not but it can be something that people take a long time to get their heads around and even longer before they can pluck up the courage to share it with other people.

I wouldn't want to guess about the numbers involved but it wouldn't surprise me if it's around 1 in 4, depending on the definition of sexual abuse.

wakka12

'a lot' is a relative term, I see no reason at all why it would occur more in ireland than any other country. if anything it would probably be occurring much less.

Academic

Truly reliable statistics are impossible to find, and estimates are almost certainly too low owing to underreporting on the part of victims.

Here’s one source from a few years ago:

https://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/criminal-justice/global-prevalence-child-sexual-abuse

A few highlights.

First, a global estimate

“An estimated 7.9% of men and 19.7% of women globally experienced sexual abuse prior to the age of 18.”

The countries with the highest rates surprised me a bit, particularly the inclusion of Israel.

“For women, seven countries reported prevelence [sic] rates above 20%: Australia (37.8%), Costa Rica (32.2%), Tanzania (31.0%), Israel (30.7%), Sweden (28.1%), the United States (25.3%) and Switzerland (24.2%).”

Ireland isn’t mentioned.

Academic

I think that abuse in Ireland and to a lesser extent in the U.S. looms larger in the public mind because of its institutional connection with the church, which leads people to think that it’s actually a statistically bigger problem in those countries compared to other countries than it actually is.