Facts on Childhood Sexual Assault in Canada

• 53% of females and 31% of males have been victims of one or more unwanted sexual acts.
  
  
• Approximately four in five of those incidents happened to the victims when they were children or youths.
  
  
• False denials of child sexual abuse and recanting accurate disclosures are much more common than false reports.
  
  
• 99% of sexual assaults against females, and 95% of sexual assaults against males are committed by men.

Consequences
The post traumatic stress disorder most closely linked to child abuse is multiplicity. In research studies, over 90% of people with this diagnosis had been abused children. In clinical experience, people with severe multiplicity, with many different personality states, and complex memory barriers between the different personalities, have a 100% rate of childhood abuse.

A study in Toronto on adolescent runaways found that 75% of the females and 38% of the males had been sexually abused as children. Adult women molested as children are more likely than non-victims to manifest depression, self-destructive behaviour, anxiety, feelings of isolation and stigma, poor self-esteem, a tendency toward revictimization and substance abuse.

In a study of 93 women and 9 men who had been sexually abused as children, 60% of the women and almost 25% of the men had eating disorders. Two-thirds of the women said they never or rarely consulted a physician because they were terrified of the physical examination.

Substance abuse is unusually common among women who are victims of all forms of violence. Some studies have demonstrated significant relationships between histories of child physical and/or sexual abuse and substance abuse for women.