HYDERABAD: The road to recovery of a child sexual abuse survivor is a long one and with the rising levels of such incidents in India, there is a need to have a scale to assess the impact of such trauma on children, a recently published study says.
Titled “Development of A Multi-Dimensional Scale to Measure Trauma Associated with Child Sexual Abuse (MSCSA) and Its Ramifying Impacts on Children,” the study conducted by Dr Vandana Choudharya, Dr Sujata Satapathy and Dr Rajesh Sagar from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and published in Asian Journal of Psychiatry, the study highlights the issues prevalent in the traditional method of measuring the level of child sexual abuse.
The first problem lies with language. Satapathy, in a study, found that out of the 52 Asia-centric scales reviewed, only 9 were available in Indian languages.
However, none of the nine was specific to child sexual abuse context.
Additionally, while Western countries have made continuous efforts to develop scales, there has been an alarming absence of any such efforts in India.
The need for a different scale is compounded by the distinction in the reaction that Indians and other survivors show to such abuse.
“Indians are more likely to express suicidal tendencies, less likely to display anger and sexual acting out, and had less supportive primary caretakers than non-Asians,” the study said.
Thus in the study, the doctors developed a multi-dimensional scale that could be used in India in the future.
The scale, according to experts, is specific to various concepts. For example, keeping in mind the Indian society, the model divided shame into various constructs like body shame that victims might feel and also family shame which is an important parameter in Indian families.
The model also claims to have solved the language barrier problem. Considering the socio-demographic profile of children in the present study, most children belonged to lower SES with limited exposure to English language and hence Hindi remains their primary medium of communication.
“MSCSA, thus, has been developed in both Hindi and English languages due to which it can be considered linguistically competent in capturing a culture-specific expression of trauma and hence easy to read and be self-administered,” the study said.