7 year old girl sexually abused her younger brother

Hidden problem of children sexually abusing children - news.bbc.co.uk...

To find out your five-year-old son has been sexually abused is, of course, devastating. But how do you cope when you find out that his abuser is his seven-year-old sister?

Claire's daughter Hannah was discovered abusing her brother, late last year. Both names have been changed to protect their identities.

"That was probably the darkest week of my life without a doubt," explains Claire.
"All the anger and the rage, the confusion, the revulsion. I couldn't look at her. I wanted to grab my son and run and never see her again. I was just terrified."
But Claire had more to face when it quickly emerged that Hannah had also been sexually abusing several other children.

Hannah is typical of one third of the children who display sexually harmful behaviour - to use the preferred clinical terminology - in that she has also been sexually abused herself.

Learned behaviour

Hannah was regularly sexually assaulted by a teenage boy for around two years.
"She didn't understand at the beginning what she was doing was wrong. For her it was just learnt behaviour," explains Claire.

"Her interaction with other people was all based on that because it went on for two years. So that can't be wiped away, we just have to steer her away in a different direction."

Claire says that finding out what had been happening has had a devastating effect on her relationship with her daughter.

Initially, she says, she even questioned whether she would be able to love Hannah again and rebuilding trust in her little girl is still proving hard.

"Even after all this period of time has passed I still worry, what's she doing? I worry when she's at school. Is she being monitored? Is everything ok, are other children safe around her and what will the future be?"

It is a startling fact that one-third of those who sexually abuse children are just children themselves; something which challenges our notions of childhood and understanding of what children are capable of.

This is almost unbelievable, but kids who have been abused or have learnt from porn videos what goes on, are copying these actions as a learned behaviour as though they were copying something innocent and normal for a child to do. The cycle goes on and on with each new victim. It makes your stomach churn to think about it, but that's the reality of what is going on in society today, with over 2000 cases each year, and there doesn't seem to be much that can be done to prevent some of these cases.

It may be easy to blame the parents, and probably in some cases we should, but in some cases the parents may just have never known until it was too late.

[edit on 16-3-2010 by john124]