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Child sexual abuse data from an Arabian Gulf country revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Jude U. Ohaeri  and
Ghenaim A. Al-Fayez
Jude U. Ohaeri
Affiliation:
Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital, Enugu, Enugu State, Nigeria, email judeohaeri@hotmail.com (formerly Department of Psychiatry, Psychological Medicine Hospital, Kuwait)
Ghenaim A. Al-Fayez
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Health Sciences Centre, Kuwait University, Kuwait
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We revisit our previous work on child abuse in Kuwait, with a focus on the sexual abuse data, and discuss the findings in the context of the local culture. In 2006, a nationwide sample of 4467 senior high-school students (mean age 16.9; 48.6% boys) at government secondary schools was studied. Over their lifetime, 8.6% had been sexually attacked, 5.9% had experienced someone threatening to have sex with them, 15.3% had experienced unwanted sexual exposure, and 17.4% had had someone touch their sexual parts (boys 21.1%, girls 14.0%; P < 0.001). Most perpetrators were members of the extended family. The way to assist ‘dysfunctional families’, where ‘family honour’ and the need for peaceful relations with neighbours have priority over the mental health of female victims, is to propagate the finding that child sexual abuse has a wide-ranging deleterious impact on psychosocial functioning.

Type
Thematic Papers
Information
International Psychiatry , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , November 2013 , pp. 84 - 86
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists 2013

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