Browsing by Author "Lindqvist, Leena"

Aims of the study Child sexual abuse (CSA) has declined during the recent years and decades. Risk factors for CSA have been studied extensively, and in particular, cumulative risk factors are known to increase the risk of abuse. It is not yet known whether CSA has declined evenly among youth who experience cumulative risk factors (so called youth risk group) and youth who do not. This study aims to assess if the association of risk of youth with CSA has changed during the last decades. The second aim is to find out if there has been change in the association between any individual risk factors and CSA. Methods The data of this study consisted of responses from Finnish ninth-graders from four national surveys: The Child Victim Survey studies from the years 1988 (n= 7 322), 2008 (n=5 775) and 2013 (n=5 095) and the School Health Promotion Study from 2019 (n= 42 673). In each study, respondents were asked about CSA experiences as well as four individual risk factors. Based on the responses, respondents with a sufficient number of risk factors were considered to be part of the youth risk group. The associations between cumulative risks and CSA experiences were examined in all four parts of the data using logistic regression analysis. The same was done with the associations of individual risk factors and CSA experiences. Analyses were performed separately for girls and boys. Results and conclusions Prevalence analyses showed that CSA had clearly decreased since 1988. The association between belonging to the youth risk group and CSA experiences remained roughly the same between 1988 and 2019, implying that cumulative risks did not increase the risk of CSA more or less during recent years than before. The accumulation of individual risk factors overall had clearly decreased, except for the youth who had all of the four risk factors considered. In 2019, risk of youth seemed to expose boys to CSA more strongly than girls, but otherwise there were no gender differences. Belonging to the youth risk group multiplied the risk of CSA at all time points in both girls and boys. Accumulation of risk factors predisposed respondents to CSA more strongly than any individual risk factors. The importance of individual risk factors as factors predisposing to CSA remained roughly the same.