Child abuse increases risk for later sexually coercive behavior i...( Boys who experienced childhood phys...),Health

Boys who experienced childhood physical or sexual abuse are more likely to use sexually coercive behavior against an unwilling female partner when they are adolescents and young adults.

Researchers trying to identify factors that put men at risk for committing sexual coercion have found that being victims of both childhood physical and sexual abuse made them 4 times more likely to engage in sexually coercive behavior than men who were not abused, said Erin Casey, a University of Washington Tacoma assistant professor of social work.

She emphasized that this study focused on sexually coercive behavior, defined in this study as insisting on or making someone have sex when they didn't want to.

"Although there can be physical force involved in sexual coercion, it more often involves such tactics as pressure, persuasion, insistence, manipulation and lying to have sex with an unwilling female partner."

Men who experienced some form of childhood abuse accounted for less than 30 percent of the nearly 5,650 males surveyed, but they accounted for 45 percent of the group reporting sexually coercive behavior, added Casey, the lead author of a new study appearing in the online edition of the Journal of Interpersonal Violence. Men who experienced only physical abuse were half again as likely to engage in sexual coercion as those who were not victimized. The number of men who experienced only sexual abuse as a child was too small, less than one-half of 1 percent, to make any valid statistical conclusions.

"The higher the frequency of childhood abuse the more likely an adolescent or young adult was to engage in sexually coercive behavior," she said. However, Casey stressed that this study and previous research have found that the majority of child abuse survivors do not use abusive behavior in adulthood.

The study also found that 55 percent of the men who reported coercive behavior did not experience any childhood se
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