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The following is a summary of “Barriers to Seeking Medical Care Among Youth Victims of Sexual Violence,” published in the December 2023 issue of Pediatrics by Kamke, et al.
Teenagers who are sexually abused often have health problems, but they probably won’t get medical help. However, insufficient research has been done on why patients don’t get medical help. For a study, researchers sought to look at the things that made it hard for youth victims of sexual assault who called the National Sexual Assault Online Hotline to get medical help.
They used old information from one-on-one chats with young victims that took place between June 2018 and February 2020. Through an online survey, hotline staff discussed why people weren’t getting medical care. They coded and looked at the quality of these reasons using information about 520 people who had health problems but had yet to go to the doctor.
Three types of hurdles that victims faced were caused by their views and the circumstances they were in thinking they didn’t need medical care, worrying about what would happen if they went to the doctor, and not being able to get to the doctor physically. People who thought they didn’t need care didn’t know how abuse affected their health or didn’t think they needed care as much as they did. Some expected effects were loss of privacy and control over information being shared, shame, revenge from the offender, problems in the family, and medical care that would re-traumatize the person. Victims who couldn’t physically get to care didn’t know how to do it on their own, didn’t have any social support, or were being stopped from getting care by the abuser.
Medical care can help with serious health problems and make people feel safer, but youth victims said they had a hard time getting care. Several hurdles hinted at the unexpected effects of laws on child abuse, such as the need to report it. Trauma-informed policy and practice were very important in making it easier for sufferers to get medical care and other support services.
Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1054139X23003452
