A recent study on childhood violence found that boys experience more sexual violence than girls. The Council for the Welfare of Children and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) conducted the study and released the results. The National Baseline Study on Violence Against Children focused on children in the Philippines. It revealed:
[…] that 21.5 percent of the respondents or one in five children experienced any form of sexual violence in any setting, may it be at home, school, workplace, community or during dating.
But of this number, 28.7 percent of the male respondents admitted to have experienced sexual violence, while only 20.1 percent of the female respondents said so.
The researchers did note that the higher prevalence of sexual violence in general could come from their definition of sexual violence. The researchers sexual violence as “taking photos or sex videos of being naked or engaging in sexual activities, unwanted touch, forced attempted sex, and forced consummated sex.” The first two include someone forcing the child to make the pictures or videos as well as the child doing it himself.
While that definition strikes me as broad, it does not alter the findings regarding sexual violence. Those results show that most of the sexual violence children reported involved touching of some sort. Continue reading
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