Rape & Victim
What is rape?
Rape is any form of forced sexual activity that you don't agree to, ranging from touching to penetration. Rape is a crime and a sin. God is against rape in all it's form. It's a crime even if you already know the person who attacked you, including a spouse, another family member, a friend or someone you work with. It's a crime even if you didn't fight back. It's a crime even if you were drinking, taking drugs, given drugs or were unconscious. Anyone can be raped, including men, women, children and elderly people.
What should I do if I've been raped?
If you're raped, you should first get to a safe place, away from your attacker. Then you should immediately go to a hospital emergency room. Don't bathe or change your clothes before you go to the hospital. Just get there as fast as you can. You can call the police from the hospital.
What happens in the emergency room?
The doctor in the emergency room will examine your body for injuries and collect evidence. There may be pieces of evidence such as clothing fibers, hairs, saliva, semen or body fluid that may help identify the attacker. In most hospitals, a "rape kit" is used to help collect evidence. A rape kit is a standard kit with little boxes, microscope slides and plastic bags for collecting and storing evidence. Samples of evidence may be used in court.
Next, the doctor will need to do a blood test. Women will be checked for pregnancy and all rape victims are tested for diseases and infections that can be passed through sexual contact. Cultures of the cervix may be sent to a lab to check for disease, too. The results of these tests will come back in several days or a few weeks. It's important for you to see your own doctor in 1 or 2 weeks to review the results of these tests. If any of the tests are positive for disease or infection, you'll need to talk with your doctor about treatment.
What kind of treatment might I need?
The emergency room doctor can tell you about different treatments. If you take the birth control pill or have an intrauterine device (IUD), your chance of pregnancy is small. If you don't take the pill, you may consider pregnancy prevention treatment. Pregnancy prevention consists of taking 2 estrogen pills when you first get to the hospital and 2 more pills 12 hours later. This treatment reduces the risk of pregnancy by 60% to 90%. (The treatment may make you feel sick to your stomach.)
The risk of getting a sexually transmitted infection during a rape is about 5% to 10%. Your doctor can prescribe medicine for chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis when you first get to the hospital. If you haven't already been vaccinated for hepatitis B, you should get that vaccination when you first see the emergency room doctor. Then you'll get another vaccination in 1 month and a third in 6 months. The doctor will also tell you about human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. Your chance of getting HIV from a rape is less than 1%, but if you test positive for HIV, treatment will be started immediately.
What else should I know?
Being raped can have a huge effect on your life. You may be upset, and you may feel disbelief, fear, anxiety and guilt. You may have an upset stomach or feel nervous. About half of all people who are raped say they are depressed sometime in the first year after the attack. It's important that you keep appointments with your doctor. Be sure to tell him or her about any physical, emotional or sexual problems you have during this time, even if you don't think they're related to the rape.
Where can I get more information?
Be sure to visit your doctor 1 or 2 weeks after the rape to review the results of the tests done in the emergency room. Your doctor will give you information and tell you more about other support services, too. Some of these services include hospital social workers, local rape crisis services, your local public health department and the state attorney general's office.
Remember, sexual assault is a terrible crime. But it's not your fault, and you didn't cause it to happen. Rape is against the law, both human law and God's law. You have the right to report this crime to the police, and you have the right to be treated fairly during the justice process.
What is Sexual violence?
Sexual violence is defined as: any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, unwanted sexual comments or advances, or acts to traffic, or otherwise directed, against a person’s sexuality using coercion, by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any setting, including but not limited to home and work.[citation needed]
Coercion can cover a whole spectrum of degrees of force. Apart from physical force, it may involve psychological intimidation, blackmail or other threats – for instance, the threat of physical harm, of being dismissed from a job or of not obtaining a job that is sought. It may also occur when the person aggressed is unable to give consent – for instance, while drunk, drugged, asleep or mentally incapable of understanding the situation.
What is Sexual Assault ? Sexual assault, also called sexual molestation, sometimes sexual violence, is an assault of a sexual nature on another person. Although sexual assaults most frequently are by a man on a woman, it may be by a man on a man, woman on a man or woman on a woman, or adult on a child.
While sexual assaults are associated with the crime of rape, it may cover assaults which would not be considered rape. What constitutes a sexual assault is determined by the laws of the jurisdiction where the assault takes place, which vary considerably, and are influenced by local social and cultural attitudes.
Every year, an estimated 300,000 women are raped and 3.7 million are confronted with unwanted sexual activity. In addition, of the approximately 900,000 children who are maltreated each year, 9% are sexually abused.
Depending on jurisdiction, sexual assault may include rape, forced vaginal, anal or oral penetration, forced sexual intercourse, inappropriate touching, forced kissing, Child sexual abuse, or the torture of the victim in a sexual manner.
Info from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 2010 adapted by Ammgospel
What is Child sexual abuse?
Child sexual abuse is Sexual assaults on children and are normally viewed far more seriously than those on an adult. This is because of the innocence of the child victim, and also because of the long-term psychological impact that such assaults have on the child.
Child sexual abuse is a form of child abuse in which an adult or older adolescent abuses a child for sexual stimulation. Forms of CSA include asking or pressuring a child to engage in sexual activities (regardless of the outcome), indecent exposure of the genitals to a child, displaying pornography to a child, actual sexual contact against a child, physical contact with the child's genitals, viewing of the child's genitalia without physical contact, or using a child to produce child pornography.
The effects of child sexual abuse include: depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, propensity to re-victimization in adulthood, and physical injury to the child, among other problems. Sexual abuse by a family member is a form of incest, and can result in more serious and long-term psychological trauma, especially in the case of parental incest.
Most sexual abuse offenders are acquainted with their victims; approximately 30% are relatives of the child, most often brothers, fathers, mothers, sisters and uncles or cousins; around 60% are other acquaintances such as friends of the family, babysitters, or neighbors; strangers are the offenders in approximately 10% of child sexual abuse cases.
Studies have shown that the psychological damage is often particularly severe when sexual assault is committed by parents against children due to the incestuous nature of the assault.[20] Incest between a child or adolescent and a related adult has been identified as the most widespread form of child sexual abuse with a huge capacity for damage to a child.
What is Child pornography?
Child pornography, also known as child abuse images, refers to images or films depicting sexually explicit activities involving a child; as such, child pornography is a visual record of child sexual abuse. Abuse of the child occurs during the sexual acts which are photographed in the production of child pornography, and the effects of the abuse on the child (and continuing into maturity) are compounded by the wide distribution and lasting availability of the photographs of the abuse.
What is Child prostitution?
The prostitution of children is a form of commercial sexual exploitation of children in which a child performs the services of prostitution, most often for the financial benefit of an adult.
In India, the federal police say that around 1.2 million children are believed to be involved in prostitution. A CBI statement said that studies and surveys sponsored by the ministry of women and child development estimated that about 40% of all India's prostitutes are children.
Thailand’s Health System Research Institute reported that children in prostitution make up 40% of prostitutes in Thailand. In many parts of the world, child prostitution is tolerated and ignored by the authorities. Reflecting an attitude which prevails in many developing countries, a judge from Honduras says, on condition of anonymity: "If the victim [the child-prostitute] is older than 12, if he or she refuses to file a complaint and if the parents clearly profit from their child's commerce, we tend to look the other way".
What is Child sex tourism?
Child sex tourism (CST) is a travel to a foreign country for the purpose of engaging in commercially facilitated child sexual abuse. Child sex tourism results in both mental and physical consequences for the exploited children, that may include "disease (including HIV/AIDS), drug addiction, pregnancy, malnutrition, social ostracism, and possibly death", according to the State Department of the United States.
What is Commercial sexual exploitation of children?
(CSEC) constitutes a form of coercion and violence against children and amounts to forced labour and a contemporary form of slavery.
A declaration of the World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, held in Stockholm in 1996, defined CSEC as:
‘sexual abuse by the adult and remuneration in cash or kind to the child or a third person or persons. The child is treated as a sexual object and as a commercial object.’
CSEC includes the prostitution of children, child pornography, child sex tourism and other forms of transactional sex (survival sex) where a child engages in sexual activities to have key needs fulfilled, such as food, shelter or access to education.
What is Sexual slavery?
Sexual slavery or forced sexual slavery is the organized coercion of unwilling people into different sexual practices. The incidence of sexual slavery by country has been studied and tabulated by UNESCO, with the cooperation of various international agencies. Sexual slavery may include single-owner sexual slavery, ritual slavery sometimes associated with traditional religious practices, slavery for primarily non- sexual purposes where sex is common, or forced prostitution.
In general, the nature of slavery means that the slave is de facto available for sexual intercourse, and ordinary social conventions and legal protections that would otherwise constrain an owner's actions are not effective. For example, extramarital sex between a married man and a slave was not considered adultery in most societies that accepted slavery.
What is forced prostitution?
Sexual slavery encompasses most, if not all, forms of forced prostitution [citation needed]. The terms "forced prostitution" or "enforced prostitution" appear in international and humanitarian conventions but have been insufficiently understood and inconsistently applied. "Forced prostitution" generally refers to conditions of control over a person who is coerced by another to engage in sexual activity.
Forced prostitution, also known as involuntary prostitution, is the act of performing sexual activity in exchange for money on a non-voluntary basis. There are a wide range of entry routes into prostitution, ranging from "voluntary and deliberate" entry, "semi- voluntary" based on pressure of circumstances, and "involuntary" recruitment via outright force or coercion.
According to the Rome Statute (Article 7(2)(c)), sexual enslavement means the exercise of any or all of the powers attached to the "right of ownership" over a person. It comprises the repeated violation or sexual abuse or forcing the victim to provide sexual services as well as the rape by the captor. The crime has the character of a continuing offence. The Rome Statute's definition of sexual slavery includes situations where persons are forced to domestic servitude, marriage or any other forced labour involving sexual activity, as well as the trafficking of persons, in particular women and children.