**This article contains discussions of childhood abuse, including sexual violence, that may be distressing for some readers. Please proceed with care and take breaks as needed. If you are affected by these topics, consider seeking support from a trusted person or professional.
I don’t usually write about childhood abuse because it is one of those topics that makes me so sick to my stomach that it paralyses me. So much so that I actually took way too long to write this newsletter (and ended up skipping a whole week).
But UNICEF has just released the first-ever global estimate of how big the problem of sexual violence against children is. And the numbers are shocking.
More than 370 million girls and women alive today – or 1 in 8 – have experienced rape or sexual assault before the age of 18. The number goes up to 1 in 5 women when ‘non-contact’ forms of sexual violence, such as online or verbal abuse, are included. Also, around 1 in 11 boys report having experienced rape or sexual assault during childhood.
It is hard to swallow that violence against children is so pervasive. Any intentional harm or mistreatment to a child under 18 years old is considered child abuse — we are talking about physical, sexual, emotional and/or psychological maltreatment or neglect.
Nearly 3 in 4 children — or 300 million children — aged 2–4 years regularly suffer physical punishment and/or psychological violence at the hands of parents and caregivers, says the World Health Organization.
I recently had to prepare to deliver a workshop at an international journalism conference in Athens and I had to stop and think a little more deeply about how we approach the idea of child abuse as a society. We journalists have an important role, which is to make sure that truth is uncovered and that perpetrators are caught and punished. But what is the line between reporting what is needed and our weird fascination with the world’s worst horrors?
I think we can tell a lot about how we think about it by starting how difficult it was to get to the data to begin with. The report is based on surveys done between 2010 and 2022 across 120 countries — and they are retrospective, i.e. adults reflecting on their past. But it wasn’t easy.
Until 2015, gathering data about sexual violence against children wasn’t even on the global agenda. That changed when the international community committed to ending all forms of violence against children with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). One of these goals, Target 16.2, specifically focuses on ending abuse, exploitation, trafficking, and violence against children by 2030. UNICEF was put in charge of tracking one key measure: how many young people (aged 18 to 29) experienced sexual violence before turning 18. This was a major step, but comparing data across countries has been tough, as definitions and measurements of violence vary widely.
To address these challenges, UNICEF developed the International Classification of Violence against Children (ICVAC), with input from over 200 experts worldwide. This is the first global standard for defining and measuring violence against children, approved by the UN in 2023. While this is a big milestone, simply having a global standard isn’t enough.
The next step is working on tools to turn these definitions into meaningful data that can be compared across countries, helping us understand the real scope of the issue and what action can be taken worldwide.
My own experience of abuse
I myself was abused as a child. I was five or six years old. It happened once. With someone that was external to my family — a hairdresser. While my mom was getting her haircut in another part of the salon, the hairdresser used the time to touch me, and I simply could not speak out. I did — months later.
My mom at the time tried to report the incident to several people in the place where we lived. She heard that many knew about this hairdresser and how “fond” he was of little girls, as people would nicely put it. There wasn’t a clear avenue that my mom could pursue to report him properly to the police, nor any help at the time that seemed available for her or for myself, for that matter.
I remember, one night at a IWMF fellowship, some ten years ago, talking to a great journalist who was about to pursue a story about her gym professor who had abused her when she was a child. (The podcast, Silent Evidence, is here. The journalist is called Tennessee Watson.) Tennessee talked about how hard it was to cover this story, and how survivors of abuse feel about themselves and their bodies. She spoke of insecurity, of body issues, of eating disorders — some of which I could recognise in myself. I remember that something clicked. I understood that in a layer of myself, there was also the part of me that had survived abuse.
I think I’ve processed this long enough in therapy. And I am well. And I’m profoundly shaken by it in all the ways that I can be profoundly shaken by it.
I have also researched trauma enough to know that I was lucky because my episode of abuse was a one-off and it didn’t involve a family member or someone within our circle (which is what usually happens). Sexual abuse is one of those so-called Adverse Childhood Experiences (Aces) that can have a long-lasting effect on people’s mental, emotional, spiritual and physical health, as I’ve written in the past.
What I ask myself, as a survivor and journalist, is why we are so terribly obsessed with the details of what happens — and we are not as obsessed with focusing on how to support people in overcoming their experiences?
With love and care,
Irene
📣 The First 1,000 Days is edited by community member and friend, Shaun Lavelle.
📹 Photo by Teresa Howes on Pexels, A soft, light brown teddy bear sits on a bed, facing away from the camera, looking towards a bright window with curtains.
…