By Dr. Wendy Smith | The impact of early sexual abuse lives on after childhood.
PSYCHOLOGY TODAY (Dr. Wendy Smith) – October 21, 2025
KEY POINTS
- Child sexual abuse has impacts that are long-lasting and pervasive.
- Children often cope with the bewildering and overwhelming nature of sexual abuse by blaming themselves.
- Being heard and understood by caring others enables victims of child sexual abuse to heal.
Sexual abuse experienced in childhood is not always consciously remembered by the child, but like uranium, it lives forever. It is a subject of great interest, yet as we see in the Menendez and Epstein cases, one that is extremely difficult to talk about. The searing realities of its victims’ experiences are pushed off center stage, referred to in general, but rarely centered in the public or legal discourse.
Sexual Abuse Affects Every Part of a Child
Every kind of abuse in childhood is damaging and confounding to its victims. Recovery from the wounds and doubts engendered by physical abuse, emotional abuse, and severe neglect takes years, if not a lifetime. Sexual abuse assaults the person in a very particular way, causing specific additional harms, while carrying within it aspects of physical and emotional abuse as well.
When a child’s body is used for sexual purposes, the impact goes beyond what has occurred physically. The effects and consequences are not bounded by our narrow conceptions of sexual acts but instead flow into and throughout the being of that child. Every part of the experience—neurobiological, psychological, and cognitive—reaches into every part of the child, yet a child has little capacity for understanding or organizing what is happening and no language or known context in which to situate these experiences.
How Children Try to Cope With Sexual Abuse
Children have to find a way to manage these undigestible experiences—to banish them from awareness or create a category to put them in. When the abuser is part of their daily life, most children will locate the “badness” in themselves rather than see a person they need and depend on as bad and unsafe. That would make their world feel much too dangerous. Children who are very small may not be able to discern that what is happening is being done to them, as distinct from it being a part of them.
Sexual abuse gives rise to enduring shame and doubts about what has happened, what is real, what it means about the perpetrator and oneself, and what the future holds. A young woman I interviewed for my forthcoming book, Before Their Crimes: What We’re Misunderstanding About Childhood Trauma, Youth Crime, and the Path to Healing, said it this way:
“I was sexually molested at a young age [5 years], but I didn’t tell because that person told me he would hurt my family if I told anyone. Part of me felt like it was wrong because we were always hiding when he was doing it…I felt disgust in myself because I felt like I allowed that to happen… Even though people tell you that you didn’t do anything, something was done to you, there’s always a little voice in your head that says you could have done something. I think that was the biggest part of why I grew up as such a difficult child and ended up in foster care and the juvenile justice system and abused drugs.”
The Risk of Re-victimization
Child sexual abuse distorts the development of the sense of self and trust in others. Those who have experienced it are at greater risk for revictimization. They may lack adult protection; they may not see themselves as valuable and deserving of protection; they may believe this is their fate; they may not be able to assess the trustworthiness of others.
Healing From Child Sexual Abuse
Victims of childhood sexual abuse cannot be expected to achieve healing on their own. Early-occurring assaults on the self are disruptive to the development of the very capacities that make self-soothing and healing possible. When you feel devalued and hurt, when you think you may be the source of the painful experience, you need an understanding, caring other with a different perspective to help you sort out what has happened to you.
It is the greatest, saddest irony that child sexual abuse makes the victim ashamed rather than the perpetrator. Perhaps it is our own shame at having failed to protect child victims that makes us look away from the damage caused by these experiences, focusing on holding abusers accountable for their acts, but failing to recognize the breadth, depth, and long life of the impact of those acts.
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References
Oshima, K., Jonson-Reid, M. & Seay, K. (2014) The influence of childhood sexual abuse on adolescent outcomes: The roles of gender, poverty, and revictimization. J of Child Sexual Abuse, 23(4), 367-386.
Pittenger, S., Pogue, J. & Hansen, D. (2018). Predicting sexual revictimization in childhood and adolescence: A longitudinal examination using ecological systems theory. Child Maltreatment, 23(2), 137-146.