Heads up: Some or all of the information below may activate difficult memories or feelings for some people. As a sexual assault survivor, including in childhood, and an abuse educator, I do my best to write about these subjects as sensitively as possible, but that doesn’t mean anything below can’t or won’t be upsetting or uncomfortable.
We’ve been fielding a lot of questions in our direct services over the last year about child-on-child sexual abuse (COCSA), most likely because of short-form posts about it on social media platforms that have some users very worried they may have been victims or perpetrators.
A need for this newish term came from the lack of study and understanding of experiences among children, including sexual trauma. By naming it and emphasizing it, more resources and focus can be put towards research and policy focused on abuse prevention. An important thing to be aware of is that this term was developed by and for professionals who provide services and support to children and young people, like social workers. It may not be — and I’d say it clearly isn’t — as useful for individual people for understanding their own life experiences. A newly coined term can have an impact on children and young people in the short term, and not always a good one, especially in social media that favors soundbites and slideshows, and people who present themselves as experts even when they are not. Nuanced discussions are incredibly hard to have or even know the need for in this kind of environment.
As with any kind of abuse, this kind is complex and diverse. People’s experiences with it can’t be easily summed up, so the term may be more useful for some than others when it comes to understanding and talking about the many different experiences that may be considered child-on-child sexual abuse. It’s also extra tricky because our understanding of what it is exists within a nearly universal culture which is very uneducated about sexuality and sexual behavior in childhood.
Here are some things — from someone with nearly 30 years of experience providing sex, relationships, and health education to young people, a background in early childhood education, and lived experience as an assault survivor — I think are important and helpful to know about child-on-child sexual abuse.
Some working definitions
“Child” is not a universally-defined term. It can potentially mean anyone from an infant to someone who will be a legal adult by turning 18 in the United States tomorrow. The term COCSA is generally intended to describe abuse that happens or happened between prepubescent children in the same general age group or developmental category, but even that is murky, since puberty can start as early as the age of 8 or as late as 14 or 15.
Children, through all phases of their development (potentially even in utero!) possess sexualities, including sexual curiosity. Possessing or expressing sexuality at any age is not abuse in and of itself, nor does it indicate abuse has occurred all by itself.
Separate from individual diversity, infant, toddler, child, juvenile and adolescent sexualities are all generally different from each otherexternal link, opens in a new tab in some big ways. They are all also usually different — and more so the earlier in human development a person is — from adult sexualities and all of their different potential stages. As is most often the case with adults, children will also seek to actively express and explore their sexualities, which can include looking at, talking about, or touching their own bodies or the bodies of someone else. Both the desire to explore sexuality and doing so are not by themselves signs of pathology or abuse: these are common parts of the human experience. It is also common for children to engage in play — which may or may not include what adults typically consider sexual play — that involves exploring power dynamics, sometimes including boundary exploration, even though very few children would explain their play or exploration in those words.
Sexual expression between children is not only not abuse in and of itself, it often is not abuse. Again, children at every stage of development will often express sexual curiosity with other children. Things like showing one another genitals or other body parts or asking to see or touch them, playfully acting out physical affection or sex, or talking about sex or telling jokes about genitals or sex are all examples of things that are typically considered normal, benign and even healthy parts of sexual and social developmental activity for young children. Sexual abuse, however, is not considered part of these normal expressions of child sexuality.
Like other kinds of sexual abuse, child-on-child sexual abuse can be physical, verbal, emotional and also digital (like online sexual harassment or revenge porn). What makes abuse sexual isn’t necessarily about genitals so much as that the perpetrator intends what they are doing to be sexual and/or involves activities or actions generally considered to be sexual, like oral sex or intercourse. It can happen between schoolmates, neighbors, friends and family members: sibling-based sexual abuse is one of the most common scenarios of child-on-child sexual abuse. It can be something that one child does to another autonomously, or because another child, teen, or adult directs a child to do in some way. It can be something that happens once, or that happens more than once over time, sometimes regularly, sometimes with long lapses in between. One very clear definition of COCSA is: sexual activity between children that occurs without consent, without equality (mentally, physically, or in age), or as a result of physical or emotional coercionexternal link, opens in a new tab.
Many children and young people have, do and will initiate or be part of sexual activity that is not consensual. Sometimes non-consent occurs within an abusive context, and sometimes it doesn’t. We should have very different expectations of what consent will look like when something — such as touch or verbal interactions — is happening between toddlers, most of whom don’t know how to ask for consent for anything yet, and when it is happening between two people about to vote in a Presidential election.
Sometimes children and other minors know how to ask each other for permission, do ask for permission, and will often get some form of willing permission. Sometimes children and other young people don’t ask, because they don’t know they should ask or know how to ask, mostly because it’s still so uncommon for parents and other adults to teach children about consent and when and how to engage in consent behaviors, and so common for children to witness or learn the wrong things about consent. The way many adults treat children (like not asking if they can hug or kiss them before they do, for example) or even with what they witness between other children or between adults, are typical ways children commonly experience poor modeling of consent.
While nonconsent or poor consenting can and does create trauma for some people, we generally wouldn’t classify the kind of nonconsent that happens as a result of not knowing or misunderstanding how to do consenting as abuse.
Sometimes children and other young people know they need to ask first but choose not to, or know how to engage in consent, but don’t when they should. This is when we get into the realm of possible abuse. Generally, what makes something abuse is when someone is doing something to someone else to intentionally harm them or overpower them, without their consent, or with little to no consideration for another person.
These are some red flags to suggest abusive or otherwise unhealthyexternal link, opens in a new tab sexual behavior between children, according to the National Center on the Sexual Behaviour of Youth and other reliable sources. Red flags are always warning signs that something may be wrong, and the more of them there are in a given situation, the more likely that often is, but some things in this list can also be the case even when there isn’t or hasn’t been abuse.
Those red flags involve one or more of the following observations of sexual activity between children or minors that:
- Is more frequent than expected
- Is between children of widely different ages or developmental stages (such as a 12-year-old with a 4-year-old, or a 14-year-old with a 9-year-old)
- Is between children of different capacities, such as differing strengths, physical abilities, or cognitive capacities
- Is associated with strong, upset feelings, such as anger or anxiety/fear
- Causes harm or potential harm (physical or emotional) to any child
- Doesn’t respond to typical parenting strategies (such as instruction and supervision)
- Involves coercion, force, aggression, or threats
What’s most helpful is when someone on the outside of a potentially abusive situation, who is educated and trained in this arena, is able to carefully evaluate it. Questions a professional in this capacity might ask — and questions anyone who is trying to themselves sort out whether or not sexual behavior between children is abusive or otherwise harmful — might look like these:
- What’s motivating each child to engage in the activity?
- Is it coming from a place of curiosity or exploration? Is it being done as a way of experiencing sexual pleasure?
- Do both children see the activity the same way, or does one see it as sexual while telling the other it’s just a game?
- Is it mutual or is one child being pressured or forced into it?
- Is there a significant difference in size or age between the kids, or an inequality in things such as like social status or disability?
- In other words, is this something one child is or could be — intentionally or not — using to pressure the other?
- How do both children feel about what happened?
We need to talk about trauma.
Often when someone is asking us about abuse, they’re also — and sometimes only — asking us about trauma. Trauma is a term meant to describe events that cause us some kind of distress and any short or long-term impacts (physical or emotional) from those experiences. Trauma, and the impacts of trauma, often happens when there has been abuse, but doesn’t always happen with abuse and can also occur when there hasn’t been abuse at all.
While many of the impacts of trauma are common, trauma itself is highly subjective and individual: it’s something where two people can experience the exact same event, like a hurricane on the same block, for example, but only one may experience trauma from that thing. No one ever has to prove their case in some way for their trauma to be real or considered valid. Trauma also isn’t more or less valid based on where it comes from. For example, as a survivor of sexual assault where one of those experiences was physically violent, I often notice people who have been victims of non-violent assault suggesting that because they don’t consider their experiences “as bad” as those of someone like me, their trauma isn’t as valid or shouldn’t be impacting them in the ways that it is. I also sometimes see people suggest that if their experience was “not as bad” as someone else’s, they feel they are diminishing the validity of that other person’s experience.
Please know one person’s trauma doesn’t diminish or invalidate the other. The experience and impacts of trauma are unique, and aren’t all the same even for people who have experienced the same or similar things. I can offer myself up as example again and tell you that for me, the traumatic impact of some verbal and emotional abuses has been greater and longer-lasting for me than that of the most violent sexual assault I experienced.
People can, and do, experience trauma with or without abuse or intended harm. (For that matter, harm can also occur even when it isn’t intended.) Merely because there is trauma doesn’t mean there has been abuse, and a lack of trauma, conversely, doesn’t mean there wasn’t abuse, either.
Think of trauma like damage on a house: however it happened, and whatever kind of damage it is, that damage objectively exists and usually needs care. Trauma is also something that can happen with or without abuse. Even in sexual situations where everyone is clearly communicating and mutually consenting, trauma can still occur because things can still happen in those interactions which can be distressing, upsetting or stressful for anyone involved.
Was it abuse?
Usually the “child-on-child” part is not the part in question, instead it’s the “Was it abuse?” part.
As with most other kinds of abuse, the best person to determine if abuse has occurred is most often anyone who themselves feels they have been abused, and, secondarily, whoever else was directly involved in the interaction or ongoing relationship. The exception to that rule in this case, far more so than when only adults are involved, is that it is common for young children currently being abused not to know they are being abused because they do not understand sexuality or abuse. So, if there is no intervention at the time, these are often questions they come to ask themselves years later.
Children who perpetrate sexual abuse often have themselves been sexually abused — between one half and one third of them, in fact — and are sometimes being abused by someone else in their lives during the time of life they are harming others. This is sometimes the case with adult perpetrators of abuse as well, but at nowhere near the rates it’s true about children. This really complicates the whole situation because often these children are repeating learned behavior, behavior they often not only have not usually learned isn’t okay, but that they’ve been convinced is okay, or even good, so those children truly don’t intend to do harm in the way we usually think about harm being done, and can’t really be abusing the way we most typically think about that, either. This also means that at the same time a child-on-child abuse perpetrator is discovered, a sexual abuse victim is also discovered too, within the same person.
Part of what can make this difficult is the role of memory. It can be very hard to know or remember if and when COCSA is happening or has happened. There are a whole lot of reasons for that. Which are most relevant or in play is going to vary a whole lot from experience to experience, or person to person.
One of the biggest reasons is that, particularly when we are talking about very young children, children still very rarely know much about consent, and often little at all about it in a sexual context. Certainly in the past, and often still today, the lone message children are given about touch and body parts is simply not to touch them, either someone else’s or their own, when those parts are genitals or some other body part that’s culturally considered sexual. When everything and anything potentially sexual is just made to be off-limits for a child, they obviously aren’t learning how to do things like seek consent, or how to handle a situation when someone is doing something to them they don’t want. This setup can be confusing, because if a child is told anything sexual is just straight-up wrong, but something is happening that feels good — whether that is masturbation or touch from someone else — they wind up in a kind of no-mans-land. That setup also makes kids understandably reluctant to tell adults because of fears of getting in trouble. When memories contradict or don’t make sense in the context of what you have been taught, it’s hard to integrate them into the larger narrative of your experience and who you are. The brain may, as an act of self-protection, obscure those memories.
The way memory works with trauma is another reason. Our minds are often incredibly protective of us. When we are experiencing something violent or otherwise traumatic, it is typical for them to shut down and basically not “write” the memory, or the whole memory, of an event into our brains. This is one major reason why repressed memory therapy is so problematic: we can’t find memories that our brains never recorded. Not only can this make remembering any abuse difficult, it can make remembering it accurately very difficult, a thing that can make it easy to, for example, misattribute abuse one person perpetrated to someone else who did not, or to bring feelings and memories from one traumatic event unto a different one, garbling what happened when, how, and with whom.
Abusers often do a lot to try and get people they have abused not to tell, or even to convince people they are abusing that that’s not what’s happening. While adults and even teens tend to be a lot more savvy with this than younger people, children have still often learned from adults or other children how to do things like engage in emotional blackmail, or make someone believe that the abuse was their fault and their doing. It’s hard to know if you have been abused if and when someone convinced you at the time you weren’t, made sure you didn’t tell anyone (who could otherwise have helped you know what happened), or both.
Children also often won’t have any understanding of what their sexuality is to know when they’re acting from a place of it, or when someone else is. One way COCSA often occurs is when one child who knows something is sexual or abusive does that thing to another child, who doesn’t, and goes along with the activity without understanding what is happening or that it may be harmful for them.
Lastly, the younger we were when something happened, the less likely we are to remember it or to remember it clearly simply because of both the passage of time and because memory doesn’t tend to stabilize for many people until they’re at least five or six, sometimes olderexternal link, opens in a new tab.
For all of these reasons, it’s good to not be too hard on yourself if you don’t remember things clearly. Unbeknownst to you, you may have been doing something caring for yourself in having not recorded all those memories, having deferred to an adult who seemed safe at the time. It’s in that spirit of care that you can approach your healing and growth now.
Ultimately, the only “accurate” way to know for sure if COCSA is happening or has happened is when someone observes this directly who can do something about it, or when someone is told what is happening at or around the time that it is happening, or what was known to have happened in the past. Otherwise, all we have to work with is anything we might have expressed then (like in a diary or drawings) to show or tell it has happened, our memories, and our feelings. Is that enough to deserve help and support? Yes.
If you think or know abuse has happened or is still happening
If you feel or know you have been sexually abused: If you are currently being abused or currently within a household or other living situation where abuse is something you have experienced and are likely to experience again, ask for help. You can start by asking right here at Scarleteen, if that feels safest, and we can help you learn what your options are and find help that is local to you. If you don’t feel ready for that, survival is the name of the game here, both physical and emotional. Do what you can to keep yourself as safe from abuse as possible (if you have lived with it for a while, you likely know some ways to do that, but also know there’s never a 100% way because this simply isn’t something within your control), and start working on a safety plan, if you can.
I’ve said this many times in advice columns and other articles about sexual abuse, and I’ll say it again here. If we are not filing any kind of report, or not outing someone publicly as an abuser, we don’t hurt anyone by following our feelings, memories, or issues that are telling us or suggesting we have been abused. We can name our abuse for and to ourselves without fear of doing someone else harm. We can seek qualified support and help with surviving abuse whether or not we are absolutely certain that is what happened or how and when it happened. Not knowing for sure, or not making a police report, is not a barrier to getting most of the kinds of help available to abuse survivors. Plus, if you’re struggling with things like PTSD, sexual anxiety, fear or aversion, you’ll usually benefit from help with those no matter what, so it makes sense to pursue them whether it turns out they came from sexual abuse or not.
If you feel or know you have perpetrated sexual abuse as a child: The very best advice I can give is to get in touch with a qualified mental healthcare provider, ideally someone (or some place, like a center for care) with an educational background or training in childhood sexual abuse perpetration. If you make it clear this was a past behavior, it will not usually trigger a report (at least in the U.S.). I’d also suggest leading with the fact that you’re unsure as to whether what you did was abuse; in other words, you should present this as something you need help parsing out and finding clarity with, rather than something you’re confessing. You may also be a survivor of abuse, which is another thing to work through with a trusted therapist or counselor.
I would suggest putting your time and energy there and finding that kind of support before you think about doing anything like seeking out who you think you may have abused to talk with them about it. Not only is someone who was possibly done harm by you the wrongest person to go to because you’re feeling bad or scared, if it turns out you did engage in abuse and do want to take responsibility with that person, that’s a very delicate situation best gone into with qualified help and support to assure that’s really the best thing for both of you.
If you feel or know a child is currently being sexually abused: If you know of an adult with capacity who also knows the child, and who you feel very sure is safe and will make sound decisions around something that can be as polarizing as this can be, I strongly suggest telling that person. That may be a family doctor, a mental healthcare provider, a teacher, community leader, neighbor, or perhaps one of your own parents, guardians or other family members. If you cannot think of anyone like that, consider reaching out to your local social services department or to a local domestic or sexual violence center instead. Because these are highly imperfect systems, some of which also have abuse that occurs within them, many of us have anywhere from mixed to very negative feelings about social services. That said, if a child is in an abusive situation that goes unreported to anyone, it is nearly a guarantee that abuse will continue, not a question. As someone who also has conflicted feelings about social services, my best advice is still to report known or possible abuse to those systems or others (like DV shelters) that may feed into them, especially if there is no other way to get help.
One More Thing
I want to remind you that abuse doesn’t need to have happened for someone to have experienced trauma around sex or their bodies, to feel bad or fearful about sex or sexuality, nor even for someone to have had negative sexual experiences as a child or to have harmed another child sexually without abusing them. There are a wide range of things that can result in any or all of those, of which COCSA is only one. Often, people who come to us asking if we think they have abused or been abused have the impression the answer to that question will resolve those kinds of feelings or issues. But even for those whose issues or feelings were caused by COCSA or other abuse, knowing that alone rarely does much. It’s far more of a starting point than a finish line. It’s working through and with those things over time, as an ongoing process, often with help and support from others, with a focus on your feelings and what you choose when it comes to your sexuality, your wanted sexual interactions, your intimate relationships, your body and other impacted arenas, where the resolution, positive change and peace happen.
So, once more, you don’t have to know for sure abuse happened, and abuse doesn’t even have to have happened to seek out help or support with painful, scary or uncomfortable feelings or memories from childhood, or what feels like the product of negative childhood sexual experiences or interactions. That’s not only something anyone can seek out help and support with, it’s something you’ll probably benefit from at least talking through with someone.
