The title of this post, “youth intimate abuse”, is a term I came up with as a more inclusive and accurate alternative to “child sexual abuse”.
As many of you know, I was sexually abused from age 11 to approximately 13-14 (I don’t remember the exact ending date). I did not realize this was sexual abuse till I was 19 and started hanging out in places where sexual abuse was actively discussed. Initially I latched onto the term “csa” because it was the most common term, it gave me validation and ability to understand and process my past. But eventually the discrepancy between my age at the moment of these events and the word “child” started catching up with me. Many other people I know were also abused primarily or exclusively in their adolescent years.
I find the usage of the word “child” to be an example of infantilization people resort to in order to present the issue as more serious. But I don’t think we need to call older youth “children” to be able to take their abuse seriously. Forcing the label of a child onto an adolescent as a necessary step in order to care about them contradicts the principles of youth liberation.
I am also choosing to label it as “intimate” rather than “sexual”, because in some cases the sexual component is either not present or is significantly lesser than the romantic component. Dictionaries like Cambridge or Merriam-Webster define “intimate” as close or sexual, not necessarily both at once, so it’s a good umbrella term for sexual abuse and relationship-like forms of abuse. This term is also inclusive of inappropriate relationships that parents and other relatives may have with the youth in their families, where extreme emotional closeness and lack of boundaries are encouraged, even if these relationships do not have pronounced sexual or romantic components.
Obviously, the term “child sexual abuse” should stay, it is a specific category of youth intimate abuse. It is also possible to say “youth sexual abuse” when you want to talk about sexual abuse of someone who is young, but is not a child. These terms relate to one another like this:
In addition to the above, I am coining this term in response to people who use valid criticism of the term “csa” as an argument why csa is a meaningless category altogether and should be abandoned. The term “csa” is not perfect for what it describes, but the phenomenon is real. Concern-trolling will not shut down discussions about abuse.
Leave a Reply