A meta-analysis: the effects of child sexual abuse towards children

Abstract

Recently, cases of sexual abuse against children became a phenomena and it is a traumatic events that give a deep impact towards the victim. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to conduct a meta- analysis on a published researched about effects of child sexual abuse towards children. There were 20 journal articles collected from Science Direct, SpringerLink, Willey Online Library and Web of Science databases with the keywords ‘child sexual abused’ ‘behavior’, ‘emotional’, ‘social’ and ‘academic’ being used. The year of papers selected were from 2010 until 2017. The researcher differentiated and analyzed the effect of child sexual abuse toward four themes: internalizing and externalizing behavior, emotional regulation, suicidal behavior and academic achievement and performance. The findings from this study shown that child with previous experiences as victims in child abuse display internalizing and externalizing behavior and poor on academic achievement and performance. The findings also shown that the sexually abused children especially girls has low emotional regulation and the victims also had suicidal ideation and suicidal attempt. The implication from this study was to provide the insight for future researchers on the effects of child sexual abuse in behavior, emotional, social and academic aspects. Since this study only focused on the effect of sexual abuse towards children, it was suggested that for future researches, the effects of sexual abuse towards different range of age such as adult with history of sexual abused should be further investigated and more effects apart from behavioral, emotional, social and academic should be considered.