New UN report says one in 10 girls assaulted by age of 20

[grimbletart]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-29071073

That's 120 million girls. And 95,000 children and teenagers murdered in 2012. 6 out of 10 children physically punished by their carers.

Do you ever feel you are losing the will to live?

I actually think the figures are conservative. Just speaking anecdotally so many of the women I know were assaulted as children or teenagers. A friend of mine did aid work in a poor area of Kenya and said virtually all the girls had been sexually assaulted by the age of 14, with there being a particular belief that if you had sex with a virgin it would get rid of HIV. Thousands of girls in Mexico, Central America and South America just disappear every year. Thousands, possibly millions, of girls are trafficked around the world. With the social and religious stigma attached to sexual assault, wars, lack of infrastructure, lack of law and order, the sheer invisibility of girls born into poverty, how will we ever know the true number?

I'm going to take one of my regular breaks from the news/ Twitter/everything soon, we seem to be sinking into an increasingly hideous pile of shit, with women being thrown under the bus at every turn.

But don't you realise that men have it bad too?
I mean if you actually look at the real statistics, men have it a lot harder, in actual fact. Get a grip.

from the article:

The most common form of sexual violence for both genders is cyber-victimisation

If they're counting verbal/written as sexual violence then that is very, very conservative - I don't think any girl in my very normal, country secondary school escaped being grabbed/groped/yelled at - to the extent that it didn't even occur to us to report it as it was so normal!

i have never spoken to another woman about sexual assault who wasn't assaulted in some way as a teenager. admittedly this is not something that comes up with every woman i speak to, but if we get onto that subject every single woman i have spoken to will have one or more examples of personal experience

What do you mean Squidstirfry? The article states that boys experience sexual assault too, but to a lesser extent than girls. It also talks about shocking levels of homicide amongst young men, but I can't see how "get a grip" is a useful response to that.

i think squid was being sarcastic

Oh

Sorry.

I read the article on the BBC earlier and I suspect the BBC have reported it badly as it didn't make sense.

In part it seemed to be talking about sexual assault or rape, and given the 1 in 10, which seems low, I imagine they are setting the "bar" quite high here - so serious sexual assault or rape.

The comment about cyber-stuff was baffling. Did they mean using that to meet up? Or that they were counting images / messages in with sexual assault? But surely lots of children in the world haven't got regular enough access to devices for things to be happening that way.

All in all it made little sense.

Like Petula, depending on what you include, the prevalence is huge. If you include flashing / groping / wanking at / etc as sex crimes (which you should), then it's going to be much much higher than 1 in 10.

Just spent quite sometime reading the UN report. Baffled as the data is drawn from a limited number of countries (at least in the graphs). The study on offering sexual services for pay by 18 year olds made no sense as most countries on the graph showed boys doing this more than girls.

And the section on poly victimisation says that girls are more likely to suffer physical violence than sexual violence. So I assume the bbc means physical assault rather than sexual assault as that is what the report seems to say. To be honest Unicef has made a hard to follow document and a couple of glasses problem hasn't helped.