Challenges and Results of Research on the Prevalence of sexual Violence against Children and Adolescents

The necessity to act against the sexual victimization of children and young people is socially and publicly recognized. Yet, the recent frequency of child sexual victimization (CSV) in Germany is difficult to establish accurately based on the available population surveys. They differ remarkably in definitions and study design. Findings on the percentage of sexually victimized children and young people differ accordingly, between low single-digit percentages and up to 20% of the sample. The large variance in the prevalence of CSV is both a challenge in the German and international context. So far, research has only established that CSV is a phenomenon of important size. Population surveys on CSV are almost unanimous in their finding of increased frequencies for female victims. While a higher threshold for the disclosure of an incident of CSV for male victims as compared to female victims may contribute to this significant difference, it still likely reflects an actual disparity in the risk of victimization between genders. Furthermore, CSV is rarely an isolated phenomenon, but co-occurs with other forms of violent acts and omissions. For poly-victimized children and young people it is difficult to disentangle the specific contribution of CSV from the entirety of the consequences. Further challenges for epidemiological research on CSV are the development of an interdisciplinary discourse with shared terms, definitions, and operationalisations, along with improved methodical standards such as (stratified) random samples of adequate size.