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Abstract

Child sexual abuse is a universal problem that occurs across gender, caste, color, religion, socio-economic group. Sexual abuse creates intense trauma and emotional problems which create serious short term and long term psychological and behavioral problems. 81.53% of the total incidence of child sexual abuse was reported amongst children between 11 and 18 years of age. The pre-adolescent to the adolescent child seems to be most at risk. Child sexual abuse could have a severe impact on the different aspects of mental as depression, stress tolerance, emotional intelligence, resilience, self-esteem and psychological well-being. The present study is to find the impact of sexual abuse on mental health correlates among adolescent girls. For this study, a sample of 177 adolescent girls aged 12-18 two districts of Kerala, State of India was studied. 57 sexually abused girls from Government children�s home, 66 destitute home and 54 with parents. These groups match in terms of socio-economic status and age. Instruments used for this study are Beck�s (1961) Beck�s Depression Inventory, Reshmy�s and Raj�s (1999) Stress Tolerance Scale, Thomas�s and Sushma�s (2003) Emotional Intelligence Inventory, Smith�s (2008) Brief Resilience, Dhar�s and Dhar�s (2015) Self-Esteem Scale and Sisodia�s and Choudhary�s (2012) Psychological Well-being Scale. Data were analyzed using One-Way ANOVA and Post Hoc Test. there is a significant difference between the three groups in the six variables under study. Sexually abused girls show a moderate level of depression while the other two groups show mild depression. All the three groups show moderate stress level but the sexually abused children are comparatively low. The emotional intelligence abused children in the non-abused institutionalized children. Sexually abused children have low resilience, low two groups. Thus, this study implies severe negative impact of sexual abuse on the mental health and their correlates discussed.

Biography

John Jacob Mundukottackal is a psychologist, founder and Honorary Director of Agape Mental Health and Research Institute in the State of Kerala, India. It is an NGO of mental health. Minor psychological problems and in developing the positive mental health of people at large. This is an untouched and developing field in India, especially in Kerala. He has personally counseled more than 10,000 cases and has conducted more than 2000 psycho-educative sessions on mental health for different age groups within the socio-cultural community. He is a member of ‘Child Welfare Committee’, (Government of Kerala) which consists of a bench of magistrates responsible for implementing Juvenile Justice Act amended (2006) which protects the ‘Need of Care and Protection’ for 6 years. He is also a Research Scholar towards Doctoral Program on the topic of ‘The Impact of Multi-Model Psychological Intervention on Mental Health correlates of Sexually Abused Adolescent Girls’.

E-mail: agapecounselling@gmail.com