Assessment and Treatment of Children Who Have Experienced Sexual Abuse

• Author: Loree Armstrong Beniuk, Jo-Anne Hughes, and Jack Reynolds
• Pages: 173-181

173

Assessment and Treatment of Children

Who Have Experienced Sexual Abuse

We want to remind everyone that when we were children, when we should have

been able to enjoy being children and all that goes with it, we were being sexually

abused. To make that horrifying experience even worse, images and videos were

created, and for many of us, shared with an online audience. Images and videos over

which we had no control, and that show us at our most vulnerable. ose images

and videos continue to haunt us today as they relentlessly perpetuate on websites

and in the inboxes and shared folders of an ever-growing community of oenders. . . .

Please understand that we long for the day when we can be released from the

chains that the imagery has placed on us and our future.

—Excerpts from a December 2018 statement made by the Phoenix 11,

a group of eleven survivors whose child sexual abuse was recorded,

and in the majority of cases, distributed online.

The Importance of Counselling

The impact of sexual abuse and the events that follow can af‌fect the child

and their supportive family members in many ways. Counselling provided

by trained, knowledgeable professionals of‌fers a safe venue to express feel-

ings and thoughts about those experiences and provides the opportunity

to resolve issues.

eighteen