Assessment of the Correlates of Mental Health in Sexually Abused Adolescent Girls

Sexual abuse is a universal problem that occurs across gender, caste, colour, and religion, ethnic and
socio- economic group. Sexual abuse creates intense trauma and emotional problems which create
serious short term and long term psychological and behavioral problems. 81.53% of the total
incidence of child sexual abuse was reported amongst children between 11 and 18 years of age. The
pre-adolescent to the adolescent child seems to be most at risk. Child sexual abuse is classified into
Type I (contact abuse) Type II (non- contact abuse) as Peters classification. Child sexual abuse could
have a severe impact on the different aspects of mental health such as depression, stress tolerance,
emotional intelligence, resilience, self-esteem and psychological well-being. In infants, the sex
distribution is approximately equal, but adolescent females are twice as likely to be abused as
adolescent males, largely because of the frequency of sexual abuse. The present study intends to
understand the impact of sexual abuse on mental health correlates of adolescent girls. For this study,
a sample of 177 adolescent girls aged 12-18 years from two districts of Kerala, the southern-most
state of India was studied. 57 sexually abused girls from Government children’s home, 66 non-abused
girls from a destitute home and 54 non abused girls staying with parents were selected for the study.
These groups match in terms of socio- economic status and age. Instruments used for this study are
Beck’s Depression Inventory, Stress Tolerance Scale, Emotional Intelligence Inventory, Brief
Resilience, Self-Esteem Scale and Psychological Well-being Scale. Data were analyzed using One-
Way ANOVA and Post Hoc Test. The results indicate that there is significant difference among the
three groups in the six variables under study. Sexually abused girls show moderate level of
depression while the other two groups show mild depression. All the three groups show moderate
stress tolerance level but the sexually abused girls show comparatively low stress tolerance.
Emotional intelligence of sexually abused children in institution is very low and significantly different
from the other two groups of non-abused children. Sexually abused children have low resilience, low
self-esteem and low psychological well-being than the other two groups. Sexually abused adolescent
girls have significantly high level of depression and low level of stress tolerance, emotional
intelligence, resilience, self-esteem and psychological well-being compared to healthy controls. Thus,
this study highlights the severe negative impact of sexual abuse on the mental health correlates of
adolescent girls.