18. Sexual Abuse Accelerates Sexual Development in Survivors

The difficulty surrounding this discussion — how sex fits into sexual abuse — can leave survivors feeling even more guilt and shame. It’s as if we can talk about some of what happened, but when it comes to the sex part, we have to pretend it’s not sex at all, but something else. None of this changes the fact that my first sexual experience was at age 5, and that has far-reaching consequences.

A 2017 Penn State study “found that young girls who are exposed to childhood sexual abuse are likely to physically mature and hit puberty at rates 8 to twelve months earlier than their non-abused peers” (Science Daily).

I first came across this idea when reading Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score in the chapter called “Developmental Trauma: The Hidden Epidemic.” Here Van der Kolk is writing about the long-term effects of incest. He cites the first ever study in 1986 of the impact of sexual abuse on female development. Eighty-four girls were studied over a twenty-year period, ninety-six percent of whom remained with the study the entire time (164).

“The results were unambiguous,” writes van der Kolk. “Compared with girls [in the control group] of the same age, race, and social circumstances, sexually abused girls suffer from a large range of profoundly negative effects, including cognitive deficits, depression, dissociative symptoms, troubled sexual development, high rates of obesity, and self mutilation.” Though the study was comprised exclusively of sexually abused girls, I know that the sexual abuse affects boys too in similar ways.

As horrible as these aftereffects are, none of them are likely surprising. They are the problems we have come to associate with sexual abuse survivors. These are consequences we can process.

What surprised me most about the study, however, is that sexually abused girls mature twelve to eighteen months before their peers. “Sexual abuse speeds up their biological clocks and the secretion of sex hormones. Early in puberty the abused girls had three to five times the levels of testosterone and androstenedione, the hormones that fuel sexual desire, as the girls in the control group” (165). The psychological, physiological, and sexual complications are only beginning to be understood by researchers.

Sadly, survivors understand the real-world implications all too well. They begin to have sexual problems when the abuse occurs, and these problems continue on through adolescence. Hypersexuality, which “is an excessive preoccupation with sexual fantasies, urges or behaviors that is difficult to control” (Mayo Clinic), or its opposite, hyposexuality, are symptoms of childhood sexual abuse.

To find healing, survivors have to navigate through a culture that treats sex addiction as a joke (though this is beginning to change). Until we acknowledge the impact of the sex in sexual abuse, we continue to shame sexual abuse survivors, and we stand in their way of healing.

I lost my virginity at five years old when a neighbor forced me into his garage. That’s just what happened. I didn’t do anything wrong, and I’ve spent my life unspooling the effects of that first forced sexual experience.

Sex and power. As if the two could ever be separated.