Childhood Sexual Abuse - Essay Example

The paper will seek to answer the question whether our client Marya, was sexually victimized as a child or adolescent in relation to her behavior in adulthood. To find out whether this thesis is true or false we have to analyze the book titled Madness, which describes Marya’s experience, and support our finding with knowledge from journal articles, as well as other literature containing information related to child sexual abuse. From the analysis of the book, it is clearly seen that Marya’s behavior is different from that of other children since her childhood.

She had nightmares about a goat man coming to attack her at night and, in most cases, she asked her mother questions that expressed her fear (Hornbacher, 2008). This is believed to have been caused by a disorder she was born with. However, her condition in childhood is again very different from the conditions she is in as an adult. As an adult, she suffers both sex and drug addiction; she always have thoughts of committing suicide. This is indicated by how she cuts herself and the way she is being frequently involved into having sex with boys due to lack of self-control (Hornbacher, 2008).

Most of these effects are believed to have come out of post-traumatic stress disorder. This disorder is a result of sexual events that exposes a victim to great threats of injury or even death (Shiromani, LeDoux & Keane, 2009). As a result, she might be traumatized and thereafter might suffer from post-traumatic disorder. This kind of disorder can affect a person in different ways even in his/her adulthood. This trauma can affect a child in many ways, one of them being making the child unable to interact with other children regardless of gender and social status.

This is an immediate effect where the difficulty in interaction is based on low self-esteem and self-confidence. Through this, a child’s social life gets affected negatively which can go to adulthood. Another immediate effect that this trauma might have on a child is affecting his academic life. This trauma can make a child unable to concentrate in her academics and thus affecting her education negatively. The trauma can also affect the health and growth of the child. Research has shown that most children who have been sexually abused usually have nightmares that cause them lack of sleep and in most cases, lack of appetite (Warner, 2009).

Various things trigger this kind of a disorder especially when it comes from childhood sexual abuse. One of the triggers of this disorder is loss of trust in the person that victimized the victim. The victim may also lack trust in other people of the same gender. Another trigger of this disorder is low self-esteem and lack of self-confidence that results from childhood sexual abuse. This disorder can also be triggered by self-denial that comes when one is continuously sexually abused. It is important to note that the magnitude of the disorder depend on its trigger, which can be one or several of the mentioned in relation to the personality of the victim.

Post-traumatic stress disorder developed from childhood sexual abuse, does not only affect children in their childhood, the effects are carried up to adulthood. The adult survivors of child sexual abuse exhibit behaviors that are not common in other individuals. This kind of people in most cases fails to be interactive and might fail to trust people of the opposite gender. Another