What Is Sexual Abuse?

Find a therapist to heal from sexual abuse

The effects of trauma do not have an expiration date.

Sexual abuse of adolescents has specific harmful effects.

Perpetrators feel less shame and guilt than victims do.

The survivors of Jeffrey Epstein have lived with their pain for decades while their complaints were ignored or sidelined by various law enforcement bodies. The effects of trauma do not have an expiration date. It can rear its head at any time, triggered by a song, a scent, an unexpected encounter with the past—putting us right back in the terrifying moment. The trauma of sexual abuse in adolescence lives on in sudden triggering moments, but it is also never entirely absent from the daily experience of self.

Some of the adolescent victims of Jeffrey Epstein were as young as 13 or 14. They were just becoming the people they would grow up to be, giving sexual trauma a kind of shaping influence that is diminished when it occurs later in adulthood. Teens younger than age 18 are deemed by law to be incapable of consenting to sex because the teen years constitute a critical period for development, neurobiologically, physically, intellectually, psychologically, sexually, and socially.

Young people........

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