One in five women ‘has suffered sexual violence as a child’
More than 370 million women and girls across the world were raped or sexually assaulted before they turned 18, according to the first global estimates tracking sexual violence in childhood.
The analysis, published on Thursday by Unicef, also warned that a boom in new technology and social media is “changing the landscape” and driving a new wave of sexual violence.
When online and verbal acts are included in the estimates, the number of women and girls affected by sexual violence in their childhood jumps to 650 million – equal to one in five worldwide.
“[These numbers] should shock us,” said Afrooz Kaviani Johnson, a child protection specialist at Unicef. “But from our lived experiences, we know that this is so common – sexual violence is not something that’s happening far away, it’s not a sporadic occurrence.
“So we should be uncomfortable with this, and we should be confronted by it. But what really needs to change is [the] prioritisation of action to address these issues,” she said, warning more needs to be done to prevent sexual violence taking place and support the survivors – who live with long lasting trauma all too often perpetrated by someone they already knew.
But the very fact that it has taken so long to collate global estimates on sexual violence in childhood is a demonstration that the issue has too often been swept under the rug, added Claudia Cappa, a senior Unicef statistician who worked on the report.
“The availability of data on sexual violence against children has been very limited,” she said, adding that only 60 per cent of countries worldwide gather this data in a standardised format. “We know that sexual violence against girls and women has existed for centuries, but the investment in data collecting is only just happening… [in terms of] official statistics.”
Data on the number of boys affected is even more sparse, Ms Cappa said, comprehensively collected by just 17 per cent of countries. Using this data plus extrapolations of the figures for women and girls, Unicef estimated that between 240 and 310 million boys and men (roughly 1 in 11) experience rape or sexual assault during childhood.
“Why is this data not collected? Because there is a lot of stigma around the issue,” she said, adding that survivors often do not want to talk about it, while national statistics offices “have not given the issue the attention it deserves”.
“I can say up front, even if we were to have data for every single country in the world, there is always a level of underreporting, because most girls, women, boys and men do not want to talk about it,” Ms Cappa said. “They don’t go to the police, they don’t tell a friend, and they certainly do not tell an interviewer in a household survey [for government data].”
But based on the data that is available, Unicef warned found that although sexual violence is prevalant across cultural and economic boundaries, prevalence of rape and sexual assault in childhood jumps to one in four among women and girls living in conflict zones or fragile settings.
“We are witnessing horrific sexual violence in conflict zones, where rape and gender-based violence are often used as weapons of war,” said Catherine Russell, executive director of Unicef.
Regional trends also varied. Sub-Saharan Africa had the highest number of victims, with 79 million girls and women affected, but the highest rates were in Oceania – where 34 per cent of women experienced some form of physical, verbal or online sexual violence before their 18th birthday.
“Oceania is overall a very violent region,” said Ms Cappa. “So these numbers are not surprising when seen in context with other numbers related to domestic violence, or violence against against women more broadly.”
The report called for governments to strengthen child protection and support interventions, build national data systems, and perhaps more importantly challenge the social and cultural norms that prevent children from seeking help or, in some places, allow perpetrators to act with impunity.
But Ms Kaviani Johnson also warned that more needs to be done to tackle the ever-evolving “explosion” of sexual violence online.
“Technology facilitated and online forms of sexual violence are really changing the landscape. But we’re also seeing new forms… where it’s a child being forced to do something to themselves.
“There are some kinds of interventions that need to take place to address the technological dimensions, but that holistic response where we tackle those underlying drivers is also key,” she said. “And all of this is underpinned by harmful social and gender norms.”
Protect yourself and your family by learning more about Global Health Security