Page No.113-120
Sibnath Deb and Aparna Mukherjee
Calcutta University, Kolkata
The broad objective of the study was to understand the impact of sexual abuse
on personality disposition of girl children. In order to achieve the specific objectives
of the study, three study tools were used and data were collected from a group
of 120 sexually abused girl children and 120 non-sexually abused girl children
for comparison of data. Findings revealed that majority of the victim girls (93.3%)
came from nuclear families and a large number of them were illiterate. Nearly
half of the girls were sexually abused between the ages 14 -17 years of age;
about one-third was sexually abused between 10-13 years, and others were
sexually victimized at a very young age, between 6-9 years. They were mostly
abused by the strangers, followed by relatives and known local acquaintances.
Majority of the incidents were not reported to police because of social stigma,
harassment and threat from the perpetrators. Out of a total of 120 sexually
abused girl children covered in the study, about 58.3% perceived counseling to
be beneficial while the remaining 41.7% perceived it not to be facilitative.
Multidimensional Personality Inventory explored five personality dimensions of
the sexually abused children i.e., extroversion/introversion, self-concept,
temperament, independence/dependence, and anxiety. Statistically significant
differences were found in case of all the personality variables except dependenceindependence. Sexually abused children were found to be more introvert,
possessed low self-concept and more anxious than that of their counterparts
i.e., non-sexually abused children. However, counseling improved self-concept
of the sexually abused children and reduced their level of anxiety to some extent.
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