A whole lot of CSA data

who gets CSA'd, who hates it more, age of parents, etc.

I personally was not particularly affected by getting lightly molested at 8 by my handsy grandpa. I think what he did was bad, and should have been punished (he wasn’t), and I totally believe other people with similar experiences might have found theirs traumatizing. But for me, I didn’t know what sex or sexual arousal was, and adults already made me feel uncomfortable all the time by violating my physical autonomy. Handsy grandpa was an extremely minor incident in the scope of my childhood, such that I completely forgot about it until much later.

The fact my experience seems to deviate from much of the public discourse around this kind of stuff made me curious. What if I did a survey to try to figure out why? What are the elements of CSA that make it bad? Who is it usually bad for? How much does it impact people? How do people view it in hindsight?

So I made a survey with many detailed questions about this, and then disguised it within a larger survey about general childhood experiences. What’s your childhood like? Wanna know the answer? Take my childhood survey where you answer qs and I tell you how it compares against a several metrics!

It’s currently sitting at ~32k responses - not particularly big. 70% white, 60% male, 53% bachelors degree or higher, 27yo (mean age), 71% liberal.

This survey is much more knows Aella than my BKS, but much less than most of my smaller-scale surveys; ~50% got to the survey through twitter (it did go a little viral there, so not all people who found it through twitter know me, but are presumably a few degrees removed from my circles). 35% I estimate came from unrelated-to-me sources, like referrals from my BKS (which captures passive traffic from SEO, and I sometimes make it reroute to this survey). The rest are scattered between fetlife, discord, tumblr, etc. In general I’d estimate if you asked each person who took the survey “do you know who Aella is,”, roughly 30% would say yes.

It’s hard for me to guess how this sample (very online, young-ish, liberals, somewhat aella-adjacent) might affect the CSA answers. It’s easy to predict for something like fetishes - of course we’ll be selecting for kinkier people! - but not so obvious for childhood. If you have theories about this I recommend you make your predictions before reading the graphs, not after.

One error I made is that I asked people about two age ranges - 0-12, and 13-18. I included 18 here, despite 18 being an ‘adult’. This is a really dumb error. I think it’s unlikely to affect the results too much, but it was still dumb.

So: let’s explore base rates of things first. Let’s start simple:

This is any type of sexual abuse experienced at all (0-18 years old, committed by people inside or outside the household, whether penetrative or non-penetrative). You’ll notice the difference between non-cis and cis people is almost as big as the difference between males and females themselves.

It’s more common for sexual abuse to occur pre-puberty (as roughly defined by age cutoff of 12).

People reported non-penetrative sexual abuse as more common than penetrative. Makes sense!

This is asking about who did it - did you experience sexual abuse from a member of your household? Did you experience it from not a member of your household? Interestingly, people reported higher rates from non-household members. This is a bit surprising to me, since people have way higher exposure to household members, but I guess there’s more total non-household people out there.

I’m gonna give you all the data togethere here. Below is the same data, just split out a few different ways for more intuitive viewing.

And to put it all on one graph:

I also asked two questions about the emotional impact of the experience:

“did you experience acute fear or pain while the sexual abuse was happening, at the time that it happened?”

“did the sexual abuse result in fear or pain later in life, some time after it happened?”

In general, the worst impact from sexual assault in childhood seems to be reflections on it after the fact, as opposed to the experience in hte moment. This matches up with research I’ve read on this; the Trauma Myth is a collection of interviews with survivors of csa where they found that much of the distress came from realizing the betrayal.

In general, it seems like non-cis females experience a significantly greater jump in the amount of distress they experience about their csa later on, compared to cis.

I also asked:

Coercion: did the sexual assault involve coercion? This means the use of bad outcomes if you didn’t participate (e.g., physical force, blackmailing, threats)

Rewards: did the sexual assault involve rewards? This means the use of positive outcomes if you did participate (e.g., candy, gifts, compliments)

This is of people who reported sexual assault: what did the assault consist of?

“Neither” is an interesting category. I suspect the high rate for cis males (together with their lowest rate of reported suffering from csa) indicates that they might be the most enthusiastic participants, where you neither have to cajole nor bribe them into it.

I asked about other people:

*At the time* of your sexual assault, what was your impression of the attitudes of people around you about the incident? (This is NOT about attitudes if you told people about this later in life, as an adult.)

*Later in life*, some time after your sexual assault (e.g., telling others your history after you became an adult), what were the attitudes of people around you about the incident?

With answers as: Nobody knew this happened, They treated the assault positively/as a good thing, They didn’t care/neutral/no big deal, They were slightly upset/concerned, They were somewhat upset/concerned, They were very upset/concerned, and They were extremely upset/concerned

At the time, a little over 1/3rd of people said at least someone knew about the assault. Later on in life, 70% of people said at least someone knew about it. I’m surprised it’s that low - almost 1/3 people seem to report still keeping it secret later in life.

How does CSA split out by class of upbringing?

Often the ‘elite’ option in my class in surveys is a little sus, but their responses in the survey elsewhere don’t look particularly trollish; they have normal survey time length, distribution of responses, are more educated (as one would expect), etc.

So possibly there’s a real u-shape going on here? It’s possible very rich cultures molest their kids at the same rate as lower-middle/middle class people?

Still, small sample - only n=282.

I also asked people their current class. I can thus measure the gap between childhood and current class. Here’s sexual assault rate by mobility -

I really don’t know how to interpret this. It seems like… people who have bigger rises in classes, report more csa in childhood? We should probably check this for confounds - are liberal people more likely to rise in social class and also over-interpret csa? Are CSA’d people more driven? Are people more likely to interpret actions in the past as csa, also more likely to view their childhood as worse off overall due to some kind of pessimism bias? Is it that just the very poor and the very rich are the ones more likely to have any change in social class?

Not sure. I’m not going to dive into the data for this right now, as this is an overview blog post, but I’m curious as to your guesses.

Much smaller sample here because I added this question late, but - CSA rates seem to spike pretty significantly for children of young parents. It doesn’t differ meaningfully for household vs non-household, as in the rates just seem higher regardless of who’s doing the assault.

This seems to hold even when I control for class of upbringing (e.g. filter only to people who answered ‘lower middle class’, the most popular option:

Age gap maybe seems to predict CSA, but only where father is much older than the mother? Maybe this just disproportionately selects for very young mothers:

Mental illness association is possibly very predictable, but here we go:

People are often quick to assume that CSA causes mental illness - and this is probably at least somewhat true sometimes, but I really suspect much of this is due to confounders. E.g.:

Family quality tends to be correlated - lower class is correlated with more mental illness is correlated with worse quality of life

is correlated with csa which is correlated with less healthy bmi,

which is correlated with social class again

which is correlated with quality of etc

Basically: All bad things mostly correlate with each other in one big low-quality mishmash. Who knows how much csa is a result vs consequence of mental illness? If mental illness is heritable, is it that you’re more likely to have parents with mental illness, and that type of parent is more likely to either abuse you or put you in situations where you might get abused?

So that being said, let’s glance into my other BKS survey which has the same questions, but now over a million responses:

Of people reporting schizophrenia, about 2/3rds say they experienced csa. Contrast this to people reporting ADHD, where just over 1/3rd say they experienced it.

(BKS data skews more female, so overall rates are slightly higher than they are in my childhood survey).

Let’s check ‘have you done sexual assault yourself’:

Have you ever had a sexual experience with someone else who did not want the experience? (And you knew that they didn’t want it? This *doesn’t* include consensual nonconsent, such as roleplaying an abduction.)

People who report having sexually assaulted other people, are much more likely to report having been sexually assaulted in childhood - an insane 15 to 50% jump for males! Holy shit.

Alright: we’ve scanned over the general CSA rates, how they break down, and how they correspond with a few things. In upcoming posts I might look further at correlations - which types of sexual assault cause the most distress, for example? What traits of people affect this?

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