Effects of child molestation

“Where I used to stay, there was a boy of the home who impregnated me but when I reported to his mother, she said her son could not do such a thing.” This is the testimony of 16-year-old orphaned girl Samantha (not real name).

She is just but one of the many innocent young Ugandan girls who have become victims of defilement.

Samantha lives at Wakisa ministries offices located on Albert Cook Road, in Bakuli Kampala, where she is being taken care of with several other teenagers who got unwanted pregnancies.

As fate would have it, Samantha, an orphan, never knew that the place of her guardian where she had sought solace would turn out to be the source of her troubles.

The night of horror
When her parents passed on, Samantha was taken over by her grandmother, who unfortunately, also passed on shortly after. It was at this point that a Good Samaritan woman offered to take care of her at her home in Bajo, Mukono District.

She narrates what happened on the fateful day: “At around 10pm, the 18-year-old boy of the home made his way into our bedroom where I was staying with his sister called Sharon but their mother asked him to get out instructing Sharon to close the door,” Samantha recalls.

Samantha who was then in Primary Three at a school in Seeta, however, says the sister did not heed to the mother’s instruction, leaving the door open because of the heat.

“With the door open, the boy came back at about midnight when I was already asleep on the top decker and his sister on the lower decker. He forced himself on me and I screamed but his sister just turned in her bed but never got up to help me,” Samantha narrates with tears collecting in her eyes.

She says not even the mother of these two responded to her screams but the boy warned her not to tell anyone about what had happened.
In an emotional tone, she says this was the second time the boy was defiling her and it’s when she conceived. But the boy’s family never believed her story.

“When I woke up in the morning, I went and told my guardian… but she told me off, arguing that her son could not do such a thing and was still very young to impregnate anyone,” Samantha shares.

After she was dismissed from this home, one organisation that was supporting her education brought her to Wakisa Ministries where she is now being taken care of. She believes she is about six months pregnant.

The director of Wakisa ministries Ms Vivian Kityo says this crisis pregnancy ministry was set up to come to the aid of such girls who are victims of sexual abuse and have nowhere to go after conceiving.

“Our organisation has helped more than 700 young girls between the ages of 12-20 years, with defilement comprising 80 per cent among girls between 12-16 years of the total numbers often received,” Ms Kityo says.

The African Network for the Prevention and Protection against Child Abuse and Neglect (ANPPCAN)-Uganda Chapter, is equally concerned about the increase in cases of defilement in the country.

The national statistics as per the 2013 police crime report indicate that 9,598 children were defiled that year, a figure that tallies with ANPPCANs information collected.

“With data collected last year (2013), defilement came up as the second form of child abuse after child neglect with 795 cases received,” the organisation’s programmes manager Ruth Birungi said.

Ms Kityo says that “these young girls are abused mostly by family members and friends of the family and if they don’t end up getting pregnant ,they will keep on being defiled and that is why they keep their lips zipped and do not talk about this… it would be shameful.”
This shame sometimes ends up being fatal, Birungi states.

She gives an example of a case in Jinja where a young girl who had been defiled waited for two weeks to report the matter and by the time this was done, all evidence had disappeared and not much could be done to help save her.

“By the time they got to know, everything was rotten and by the time an operation was done, she died.”
As Kityo says, defilement comes with terrible effects and are physical, social and psychological.

“The physical effects include getting sexually transmitted diseases like Aids and some other urinary tract infections.”
“Sometimes being very young, when they deliver they get complications in their reproductive systems and when they push their babies, they rupture and get VesicoVagina Fistula,” she says.

The psychological effects, Kityo says, are even harder to detect yet they have devastating impact [negative] on the life of the victim. These impact directly on their mental state and therefore dictate their behaviour.

“Many times defilement is committed by people they trust hence betraying their trust and making them hate people of that same sex. Even when one is married, it affects them and it could take them ages to trust a male person even if the person loves them genuinely,” Kityo says.

If the girl does marry later, Kityo says, when the couple starts having sex, they will not enjoy it because of the fear, that which the girl first felt when she was being defiled.

In addition to this, the girls get traumatised and are not in position to treat male counterparts as normal human beings, seeing them as problem causers. This she says also affects their ability to freely socialise with other people.

Birungi says,“These defiled girls become quiet, withdrawn, moody and they exhibit some emotional outbursts like crying a lot and quarrelling for no good reason.”

Traumatised into silence
Another worrying outcome, according to Kityo, is that 90 per cent of these girls keep quiet and never share this with anyone as long as they have not conceived, which could lead to severe depression.
Birungi adds that there are various levels of depression, including mild, middle and extreme depression which can lead to suicide or a person injuring themselves.

“They later get panic attacks when they remember what happened to them and sometimes really get sick and parents think they have been bewitched,” she says.

She adds that sometimes they feel they have been made so dirty and think everyone knows what has happened to them leading to low self-esteem. And if they do not get proper counselling, some of these girls manifest some of these psychological effects by getting promiscuous and wild.

“They intentionally go on to mess their lives, knowing they have nothing to protect and some of them have ended up in prostitution,” Kityo says.

Some of the signs that a child could have been defiled or abused in any way but has kept quiet include lack of appetite and bed wetting.
Paul Nyende, a psychologist and lecturer at Makerere University says in the extreme , this sexual abuse, tends to cause psychological trauma which sometimes is referred to as post-traumatic stress disorder which manifests in various forms.

“The trauma presents itself with a number of symptoms and can be very disturbing; nightmares are very common, where the person has dreams that are associated with the traumatic event,” Nyende says.

He says this will cause sleep deprivation and so there will be loss of energy and the person will not concentrate and will look like generally absent, totally disoriented where their minds turn on and off.

“Flashbacks are also associated with trauma where the person re-experiences the event during their waking hours. The mind is so severely disturbed that you feel you are back in the assault or abuse scenario even when you are in the safety of your own room,” Nyenda notes.

He adds that defilement also builds anger.
“There is a lot of anger and it can be targeting all adults for failing in their role of protection, so they grow up with a lot of fury in them,” Nyende states. He further says that sometimes , many may try to escape in substance abuse and ultimately end up being addicted to alcohol and drugs.

The family of the defiled person is not spared either. Kityo says sexual abuse many times leads to disentangling of the family.
“If it is a family member who has defiled this girl, it affects every member of the family, not only the young girl because the father blames the mother and the mother blames the girl and the family begins fighting.”

Besides the psychological and physical effects, Birungi says it is very costly to treat defilement victims, arguing that prevention of this would be the best thing to do.

She cites an example where ANPCCAN received a case of a defiled girl which required more than Shs90m for an operation.
Nyende says another effect is that such people have identity problems. They may have separate distinct personalities controlling an individual (multiple personality disorder).

“One keeps switching personalities; it is a subconscious way of trying to run away from one’s painful self and it is quite common in extreme situations of abuse.” Nyende says. He also notes that others may try to use food to compensate for the pains.

Important to note, Nyende says, is that “prolonged abuse could end up creating a very strong attachment to the abuser. We call that the Stockholm Syndrome, a very strange reaction.”
The effect of defilement on the victim is rarely just one thing. It is a combination of factors that leaves the child scarred for life.

How boys are affected
While it is true that it is mostly the girls who are sexually abused, some boys too get abused but many such cases go unnoticed given the fact that it is usually hard to detect.

Psychologist Paul Nyende says while the post-traumatic disorders may be the same, the boys’ reactions could vary a little.

“The boys are more likely to get reckless and also engage in self harming behaviour like cutting themselves, and could turn out to be violent and end up attempting suicide in the extreme.”