Abstract
Children who suffer from traumatic events such as child sexual abuse are exposed to many different symptoms that can affect their educational success. School support personnel, specifically, school social workers and counselors, have a unique opportunity to assist students who have experienced trauma from sexual abuse, especially since students spend most of their time in a school environment. This chapter per the author, focuses on the experiences, strengths, and challenges that may exist in school social workers and counselors working with child survivors of sexual abuse trauma. The results show that school social workers and school counselors are the correct school support personnel to work with survivors of child sexual abuse. They are trained and skilled to assist them; however, due to the lack of time available, a large number of caseloads, and a limited number of licensed social workers and counselors, in-depth work with this population of students is difficult to achieve.
TopThe Problem
There is a shortage in the literature about the trauma that can come from Child Sexual Abuse, especially within the school environment. The literature also lacked the experiences of school counselors and social workers who have the opportunity to work diligently with this population of students and how their experiences lead to implementing school-based interventions. The symptoms a child can experience from sexual abuse can affect them and their overall success as a student. Trauma can impact school performance with lower GPA, higher absence rate, decreased reading ability, and increased behavior problems (Bell et al., 2013; Appelstein, 1998; Perry, 2006).
Avery et al. (2000) emphasized how children who are sexually abused have difficulty relating to others and mastering their environment; both are skills that are important to a student's overall success. Exposure to sexual abuse trauma can impair learning, affect a child's attention span, memory, cognition, and ability to problem solve, and can result in overwhelming feelings of frustration and anxiety, all of which can affect school functioning (Simonelli, 2013; Brown et al., 2008).
Child sexual abuse is any sexual act between an adult and a minor, between two minors, when one exerts power over the other, forcing or persuading a child to engage in any sexual act (Mitchell, 2010). It includes contact offenses such as vaginal, anal penetration, or molestation, non-contact offenses such as forcing a child to watch pornography, and child sexual exploitation (Mckibbin et al., 2017).
Research Questions
This study provide an understanding of the experiences of school personnel who work with students who have experiences with sexual abuse trauma. It also provided an understanding of interventions that are implemented to assist child survivors. The following questions guided the study:
- 1.
What are the experiences of school social workers and school counselors who work with students who have survived sexual abuse trauma?
- 2.
What strengths and challenges exist in school social workers and counselors working with child survivors of sexual abuse trauma?
Key Terms in this Chapter
Trauma: an experience that a person perceives to affect them physically or mentally.
Deficit: Lacking something.
School Social Work: Mental health worker in a school setting.
Prevention: To stop something from happening.
School Counselor: Mental health in a school setting.
Experiences: Personal events that take place in one’s life, that shape and mode them and guides decision making.
Phenomenology: The way people construct meaning to the world. It is how people do what they do, how they look at the world and who they reflect on their experiences.
Child Sexual Abuse: Unwanted sexual act by adult to a child, or child on child abuse.
Intervention: Tools used to assist a person dealing with something.