Early Childhood Sexual Victimization and Future Adult sex offending
Introduction
Every year millions of children across the world fall prey to sexual predators to exploit them for different reasons. Some are tourists who take advantage of their situation while others have well-organized structures where they advertise, recruit, market, and sell children for sex (ILO, n.d.). Child sex trafficking, tourism, marriages, and pornography take place in secret, and the government does not have accurate statistics on the prevalence and places where these crimes occur. Children suffer physical, emotional, and psychological pain and do not receive the necessary support afterwards. The pain they harbor within increases their chances of indulging in similar or other violent crimes (Widom & Massey, 2015). In places where culture allows for child marriage, victims may fail to discern ignominy of the practices, and thus, propagate the tradition. This paper addresses various sexual child offenses, the prevalence, effects of victimization, nexus between childhood victimization and similar future offending, and policy recommendations to solve the problem (Ramirez et al., 2015).
Part 1
Forms of Child Sexual Victimization
Child Pornography
Child pornography is a criminal offense punishable under the federal law in which persons of less than 18 years are visually depicted in sexual acts. Victimization of the children continues many years after their pictures are posted online because anyone who can access the internet can send them. Images for child pornography are availed to the world through social media and social networking sites, mobile apps, and photo-sharing sites. Some of the images are sold to interested parties, and the shame which used to accompany such acts is reducing because online communities are agreeable to these acts. Sexual offenders manage to escape the law through the use of complicated encryption techniques in surfing like dark web or dark internet. The United States is one of the leading countries in the world where child pornography takes place (US DoJ, 2020).
Social workers, psychologists, parents, and researchers are interested in establishing the link between the abused children and the likelihood of committing similar crimes when they grow up. Most of the pictures of sexually abused children for pornography exhibit distress in their lives, while some appear to be complacent. Child pornography is not a one-time event but progresses for several years.
Sex tourism
Sex tourism is the exploitation of children sexually by people who travel from other geographical regions within a country or from outside. The sexual offenders take the cover of their heinous acts using tourism-related services, transportation, and accommodation; children or third-parties are given cash, food, accommodation, or any other favor in exchange for sexual contact. Sex tourism takes place in different ways in all settings—rural places, five-star hotels, or brothels. The child sex offenders may decide to take considerable time to befriend and win the trust of the trust before sleeping with them or engage a third party who holds the child in custody. The child sex tourist will, therefore, buys sexual services. Both male and female, married and single, wealthy, or budget tourists abuse these little children without necessarily having a preference for their age (Dixon, 2017).
It is difficult to accurately establish how widespread the vice of child sex tourism is, from the relevant authorities, the media, or self-reported cases. Reasons for the difficulties of statistical validity for sex tourism include the illegality of the activity. The organized criminal groups do perform their business in secret. Secondly, most regions of the world tend to avoid discussing the topic because it will dent the image of tourism in a country. There is also a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about the role law enforcement agencies play, the media in exposing the depravities, the community’s attitude, and the government. Sex tourism is wrongly branded as pedophilia, prostitution or loosely as sexual abuse of minors (Ricard-Guay & Hanley, 2019).
In the Americas—North, Central, and South, many tourists from the North, as reported by UNICEF, misuse their wealth when they visit countries like Columbia and Mexico. An average of about 35,000 in every Southern and Central American country experience child sex tourism. In Africa, most countries depend on tourism as a significant source of revenue. For instance, in Kenya, coastal areas like Malindi, Lamu, Mombasa, and Kilifi have the highest cases of child sex tourism in the East African region. Southeast Asia has been a long-term target for this crime. Cambodia, Vietnam, Mongolia, Philippines, and Thailand are the leading nations for child sex tourism. In Eastern Europe, parts of Russia, Estonia, Ukraine, Czech Republic are notorious for victimizing children with sex tourism. Sexual offenders are either pedophiles, preferential sex tourists, or situational child sex tourists (Al, 2018).
Sex trafficking
According to the Department of Justice, child sex trafficking the collection of activities like recruiting, transporting, harboring, patronizing, or even soliciting for a minor to engage in commercial sexual acts (US DoJ, 2020). Child sex trafficking offenders use several manipulative methods to lure children into horrendous acts. They establish a false sense of trust by offering attention, food, clothes, love, friendship, and places of sleep before they start abusing the children emotionally, psychologically, and physically in the fetters of prostitution. Often, the victims of sex trafficking are brainwashed to remain loyal to their oppressors and to evade the law enforcement agencies. The children become more vulnerable because their traffickers take them far away from the locations of residence and disconnect them from friends and family members. Every child in every race, socio status, age, or geographical location can experience sex trafficking (Ricard-Guay & Hanley, 2019).
According to the International Labor Organization (ILO) (n.d.), the total number of enslaved victims worldwide due to human trafficking exceeds 24.9 million. About 19% of these persons are exploited for commercial sex, yielding a whopping $99 billion to their masters. Worldwide, over 1.2 million children get trafficked annually for both internal and cross-border crimes. The USA accounts for more than 10,000 children getting exploited sexually. The children undergo immense psychological and physical torture as they are forced to have sex more than five times a day averagely. Sex trafficking for children has been compounded with the advancement of technology, which facilitates marketing channels worldwide. The criminals of trafficking use social media and websites to coordinate the advertisement activities, recruitment, and purchasing of minors.
Child Marriage
Child marriage is when a person who is below 18 years gets married in exchange for money and other gifts. The minor then becomes an object of sexual gratification for the rest of the prime period of her life. National attitudes and laws vary from one country to another concerning the appropriate age a girl should be married. The Middle East and South Asia are infamous of condoning early child marriage. Children do not finish their studies, and their future becomes doomed because of the insatiable depravities of older citizens. The offense of child sex tourism and trafficking are closely related to one another and o child marriage. A tourist may visit a country and promise to marry a minor and ultimately bring the child to their country of residence. Away from home and under a new environment and systems, the married child will bear the brunt of maximum and extrapolated sexual exploitation.
Several countries in Africa, the Middle East, and South America still have communities that give in their little daughters to marriage. The Masai of Tanzania and Kenya force children under the age of 15 to get married to older men in the society who are wealthy. Poverty and retrogressive cultures make girl-children to become victims of sexual abuse. Few girls manage to run away from their betrothed husbands into government shelters where they continue studying until they complete high school.
Consequences of Childhood Sexual Victimization
Regardless of the background of the children, they are bound to experience similar emotional suffering and physical violence. The biological body parts of the child have not developed to bear the frequency of the assaults from opportunists and organized criminals. They, therefore, suffer from physical injuries and pain, which may deteriorate into other diseases. Physical violence accompanies sexual exploitation because the children have not given consent for the misuse of their bodies. Those who dare resist the oppression of their captors get hurt more (Cale et al., 2012).
Besides the physical pain, a sexually assaulted child develop fear and fixed prejudices against people of a certain color or sex. The psychological pain sometimes never finds an outlet to release to the emotional burden. Children who have gone through the hands of such sexual offenders need the utmost care and counseling. They need to be encouraged that in this world, these are several good persons who loath the sexual exploitation of children. The mental conditions associated with mental torture are fear, guilt, shame, low self-esteem. It is only a few figures in society like Oprah Winfrey, who can openly share their childhood victimization without reservation. Unbridled feelings of torment may ultimately lead to suicidal thoughts because the child develops a sense of worthlessness (Confronting Commercial Sexual Exploitation, 2013).
Sexually offended children are at high risk of contracting STIs and HIV/AIDS. The stigma that follows cases of sexual child abuse exacerbates the mental condition of the victim. As a defense mechanism, the children’s victims may reciprocate the animosity to someone else to ease their pain from within. The social support from friends and the community becomes constrained when the victimized children have grown; they find it hard to support themselves.
Relationship between Childhood Sexual Victimization and Future Adult Sex Offending
People who were abused and neglected when they were little children have high chances of engaging in delinquent behavior, violence, and sexual offenses. Sexual abuse in children makes them more likely to be charged with sex crimes later on in their lives. Statistics show that more of the adult sex offenders are not arrested as they seek to evade the law. Many years after children and other persons have been exploited, details of the prolonged assault and sexual violence come out. Victims of specific sex crimes like sodomy and rape also have a higher likelihood to commit the same wrongs than victims of other sexual offenses (Zimring, 2009).
Clinical records and several research works have established evidence for the nexus between criminal behavior in adults and their children. An estimate of women of 28 to 33% of women and 12 to 18% of all men report having been victims of childhood sexual abuse. Often, the records for inappropriate touching, verbal abuse, and other sexual crimes are not accurate. Current data shows that sexual victimization follows a victim-to-perpetrator cycle because history is a significant factor in predisposing an individual to delinquent behavior. In research conducted by Cutajar et al. (2011) on 1717 persons, 75% of all the adult sex offenders reported having been victimized in their childhood. Out of this population, a quarter had physical sexual contact, and males scored higher in perpetuating the vicious cycle than females.
Children who have witnessed the early marriage in their community or were forced into a marriage by their parents may develop a soft spot for the perpetrators. Where culture conditions a group of people to accept practices handed down for several years, even the victims of the barbaric system will support an unfair cultural habit. There are several cases of old mothers who got married when they were minors and later came to terms with the community that the act was right. They force children of the modern-day also to accept to be married because they see no wrong in sexual exploitation Cale et al., 2012).
Part 2
Factors Promoting Victim-to-Perpetrator Cycle
The government, community members, and legislators need to understand the factors that promote the vicious cycle of sexual offenses from propagating from one generation to another. The first deterrent towards eradicating the problem in society is a poor understanding of the grave consequences sexual predation can have on a child. The community will hence manifest a higher tolerance to the adults to abuse children (Hamby et al., 2012; Huang, 2013). Positive affection for perpetrators must be shunned, and the offenders are jailed or punished for their immoral acts. Secondly, the victims of childhood also fail to appreciate how evil their abuse was because they were partly receiving emotional support from family members.
The longer an offender abuses children, the more likely the child become an offender in the future also. Higher frequency of predation, presence of several offenders, and use of greater violence will push the child to look to tougher defense mechanist or psychological response to the pain they face. Another research has shown that parental neglecting or inadequate supervision of parents to their children gives room for offenders to advance their sinister motives. In addition to parental support, the lack of mental health support for the child to cope with their new situation of victimization erodes their esteem. The stigma, guilt, fear, shame, and bitterness degenerates into another generation of sexual offenses. For adults, they may find it difficult to break from harmful behaviors if they are antisocial. Socializing will deflate the mind the pressure it has from past experiences (Middleton et al., 2019).
Current Government Efforts in Fighting Child Sexual Exploitation
Training Activities
The government, through the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, conducts educational programs to different stakeholders for child safety in different setting like states, urban and rural areas and on tribal lands. The audiences of the training include child welfare professionals, judges for juvenile courts, mental health professionals, students, physicians and healthcare workers, social workers, teachers in school, parents and caregivers, law enforcement personnel, and community-based organization. The motive of training is to increase their alertness of sexual offense for children like trafficking and sex tourism. In the future, the agency will need to build task forces with law enforcement units and community residents on how to report and deal with sexual offenders. Involved departments are the Department of Justice (DoJ), education, and health and human services. People should understand how these crimes are conducted within the US, how to identify predators, and how to prevent vulnerable children from exploiting (Dixon et al., 2017).
Public Awareness Campaigns
The challenge of fighting against sexual child abuse lies in the inability of people to identify and respond to crimes. The United States has a population that needs a lot of public awareness to identify and prevent crimes from happening in their grassroots. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention is already rolling out public awareness campaigns across the US to raise awareness about the horrible activities from happening. The Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Education (DoE) are engaging NGOs, the media, and the commercial sector to reach out to the widest audience about sexual abuse for children (Confronting Commercial Sexual Exploitation, 2013).
Increased Research on Child Sexual Exploitation
One of the reasons why both the government and the public do not have a strong grip on the matter of child abuse is the inaccuracy of the statistics of the crimes. Were the actual figures to be accessed, the government would have taken sterner actions to perpetrators. The HHS and DoE have a national committee with a research agenda concerning child sex abuse. The priorities for the investigation team is to find out the risk and protective factors for sexual child abuse. The strategies for handling the problem ought to be evidence-based in developing short-term and long-term plans against the problem. Research may also include conduct surveys on gender and ethnic services like education, housing, access to legal services, mental health, and physical health. Finally, the ministries investigate the appropriate multi-agency approach to use (Dixon et al., 2017).
Publishing and Disseminating Research Findings
Information is power, and when people are informed, they make the right decision. Society is certainly tolerant because they do not have a clear picture of the prevalence of sexual crimes against children (Simons et al., 2002). The US government yearly releases reports on various felonies through agencies and departments like DoJ, National Crime Victimization Survey, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) by the FBI and many others. Publishing and releasing the information to the public is a defense guard in building up the much-needed evidence for future planning. Peer-reviewed literature and reliable government releases will inform lawmakers on how to develop best practices and future policies.
Policy Recommendations to the Government
Developing a Framework of Multisector and Interagency Collaboration
It is inarguably true that sex trafficking and all forms of exploiting children is incredibly complex for one department, the DoJ to handle. The criminals conduct their business in the dark and away from the camera. More sectors need to cover more ground in various fields of profession. Educators, public defenders, mental health providers, legislators, prosecutors, and the public. The policy on multi-agency framework shall be models for child abuse, sexual assaults, and domestic violence. The public shall have the duty of reporting to the local police department upon suspecting cases of exploitation. Brothels, where child sex crimes are glorified, shall be closed indefinitely, and they be prosecuted for being accomplices to the crime. The government will have to create a task force that will, in turn, inform the involved agencies their role they are to play (Curley, 2014).
Creating a Platform for Digital Information-Sharing
One of the barriers that make fighting sexual crimes on children difficult is the lack of reliable and timely information about commercial sexual exploitation. At the tribal, local, state, and federal levels, there lacks an exhaustive list of resources on how victims can be supported. Children victims of trafficking and sexual abuse need a simpler, more reliable, and ever-accessible platform where they will report the crimes. Therefore, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention will have to engage technical experts to develop the platform through the instruction of Congress or the House of Representatives (Cale et al., 2012).
Enhancing the Law’s Response
Currently, minor victims of sex trafficking and exploitation in the US are treated as criminals using laws on child delinquency. Victims of sexual crimes should not criminalized through arrests, detention, and ultimate incarceration. Instead of directing the children to juvenile prisons, the government should develop ‘safe harbor’ laws. These will reform the children and help them recover from their past. Survivors of the horrible activities need more support than condemnation, and therefore, the territorial jurisdictions are to cease from prosecution and adjudication of the children (Gal, 2014).
Conclusion
Any child from any walk of life can be a victim of sexual abuse through sex tourism, early marriage, child pornography, or trafficking. The victims need a lot of parental, social, and emotional support to prevent them from carrying on the victim-to-perpetrator cycle. The relationship between childhood victimization and future sex offending develops through cultural tolerance of the crimes and lack of emotional care. The government should create an elaborate framework for multi- and inter-agency collaboration with the public. Also, a digital platform for sharing information in real-time will help the administration to curb the secretive crimes of sexual child abuse. The law has to change from further victimizing the already hurt children by giving them psychological support through professional mental health workers.
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