Prevalence of sexual violence against children and age at first exposure: a global analysis by location, age, and sex (1990–2023)

作者：Jack Cagney, Cory N Spencer, Luísa Sório Flor, Molly E Herbert, Mariam Khalil, Erin M O’Connell, Erin C Mullany, Flavia Bustreo, Joht Singh Chandan, Nicholas Metheny, Felícia Marie Knaul, Emmanuela Gakidou · 发表于：The Lancet · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1016/s0140-6736(25)00311-3 · 被引用次数：69 · 研究领域：Child Abuse and Trauma、Sexual Assault and Victimization Studies、Intimate Partner and Family Violence

BACKGROUND: Measuring sexual violence against children (SVAC) is vital to prevention and advocacy efforts, yet existing prevalence studies present estimates for few countries. Here we estimate the prevalence of SVAC for 204 countries by age and sex, from 1990 to 2023, and also report the age at which young survivors of lifetime sexual violence first experienced sexual violence. METHODS: We reviewed publicly available repositories for data on the prevalence of SVAC. To harmonise heterogeneity in the identified input data, we adjusted for alternative case definitions of SVAC and differential disclosure by survey mode. We then used a spatiotemporal Gaussian process regression to estimate a full time series of exposure to SVAC for each age-sex-country combination. We accounted for uncertainty in the underlying data and modelling processes. We also analysed the age at which adolescent and young adult survivors of lifetime sexual violence first experienced this type of violence by sex, data source, and world region. FINDINGS: We estimate that the global age-standardised prevalence of SVAC was 18·9% (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 16·0-25·2) for females and 14·8% (9·5-23·5) for males in 2023. At the super-region level, these estimates ranged from 12·2% (9·0-17·2) in southeast Asia, east Asia, and Oceania to 26·8% (21·9-32·7) in south Asia for females and from 12·3% (5·2-24·6) in central Europe, eastern Europe, and central Asia to 18·6% (9·7-32·3) in sub-Saharan Africa for males. At t...