Depresión clínica

Correlates of Mental Health in Sexually Abused Adolescent Girls

Abstract

John Jacob Mundukottackal and Vidhya Ravindranadan

Sexual abuse is a universal problem that occurs across gender, caste, colour, and religion, ethnic and socioeconomic group. Sexual abuse creates intense trauma and emotional problems which create serious short term and long term psychological and behavioral problems. 81.53% of the total incidence of child sexual abuse was reported amongst children between 11 and 18 years of age. The pre-adolescent to the adolescent child seems to be most at risk. Child sexual abuse could have a severe impact on the different aspects of mental health such as depression, stress tolerance, emotional intelligence, resilience, self-esteem and psychological well-being. The present study intends to understand the impact of sexual abuse on mental health correlates of adolescent girls. For this study, a sample of 177 adolescent girls aged 12-18 years from two districts of Kerala, the southern-most state of India was studied. 57 sexually abused girls from Government children’s home, 66 non-abused girls from a destitute home and 54 non abused girls staying with parents were selected for the study. These groups match in terms of socioeconomic status and age. Instruments used for this study are Beck’s Depression Inventory, Stress Tolerance Scale, Emotional Intelligence Inventory, Brief Resilience, Self-Esteem Scale and Psychological Well-being Scale. Data were analyzed using One-Way ANOVA and Post Hoc Test. The results indicate that there is significant difference among the three groups in the six variables under study. Sexually abused girls show moderate level of depression while the other two groups show mild depression. All the three groups show moderate stress tolerance level but the sexually abused girls show comparatively low stress tolerance. Emotional intelligence of sexually abused children in institution is very low and significantly different from the other two groups of non-abused children. Sexually abused children have low resilience, low self-esteem and low psychological well-being than the other two groups. Thus, this study highlights the severe negative impact of sexual abuse on the mental health correlates of adolescent girls.