Caring adults often feel helpless in the face of today’s alarming news:
- Children are the most criminally victimized segment of the population, and a significant number face multiple victimizations during a single year (Finkelhor, D., 2008).
- At some point in their lifetime, 54% of children and adolescents (ages 0 to 17) experience some form of physical assault, 25% are victims of physical bullying, and 30% are victims of emotional bullying (Townsend, C. & Rheingold, A. A., 2013).
- Nationwide, 14.8% of students report being cyberbullied, including being bullied through e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging, websites, or texting, according to the report, by the Centers for Disease Control in 2014.
- About one in ten children will be sexually abused before their 18th birthday (Townsend, C. & Rheingold, A. A., 2013).
- Approximately 40% of child victims disclose that they have been sexually abused and many do not disclose at all (Ullman, S.E., 2007).
- About 90% of all abuse happens with a person a child knows (Finkelhor, D., 2012).
- About 1/3 of these are family members and the other 2/3 are people the child routinely comes into contact with and often trusts (Finkelhor, D. , 2012).
- 40% of children sexually abused are abused by other kids (Finkelhor, D., 2012).
- People with developmental disabilities are victimized at a rate nearly 11 times higher than their typical peers and are often repeatedly assaulted (Sobsey, D., 1995).
- Childhood emotional, physical and sexual abuse has a range of physical, psychological, and behavioral consequences for individual victims, both immediate and long-term. These include episodes of depression, suicide attempts, substance abuse, domestic violence and developing life-threatening illnesses such as heart disease, cancer and stroke (van der Kolk, 2005).
