Recomendation

What I wish I had done was added the second question to the survey. And that I had done a topic that would have been easier to find a publish source for.

Conclusion

With my reading I learned that I was not the only one who fell into a bad diagnosable state after abuse and that it does happen a lot of times. With the survey data I learned that a lot of people have gone through similar things to my experience. Now its time to go back and answer the research questions.

How does abuse effect teenagers ability to trust?

It has been proven that kids that have been abused grow up to not trust as easily if at all and that they have a hard time forming relationships. They also can be diagnosed with mental diseases caused by all of the hard times they had gone through.

Do teenagers that have been abused trust the people that they knew before the abuse?

Sadly I could not find any data on this subject.

Survey Data

The survey data came out as I expected. The data is made up of 100 9th Grade Students from Decatur High School. Except for one simple question which was have you ever been abused? I had actually expected that more people had been abused. 37% had been abused in some form while 63% have never been abused in their lives.



Out of the 37% of people that had been abused 17% of the people actually do trust people easily after their abuse. 53% of them take a while to get to know people first before opening up. The last 29% of the people just keep to themselves and don't really open up to people.





The last thing I had wanted to know how long did it take them to tell people about their abuse. 9% of these people told people right away. 19% of the people took a few months to tell people about the abuse. 19% took only a few days to tell people. 16% took under five years but over a few months to tell people about it. While a whole 35% took over five years to tell someone.

Source

Yesterday I finally found a source, and not just one but TWO!!!!!!!!! The first source is an article from the Irish Times. The article is titled Justice catches up with abuser but victim's life is still on hold. The article reports about a man who was sexually abused by his priest at the age of only six years old, which was actually around the age that I was. In the article they talk about how the little alter boy had been abused by the man around 70 times over a two year period. Now as a man he has been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder and depression.

The second source is an article from teen ink, a literary magazine and website. This is a real life story about how a girl who was sexually abused by a man down the street. She was not the only one abused either there was a street full of kids. Sadly the man was only sentenced to two years of house arrest. It reports about how the girl lost her self-esteem and said that she might not ever be able to trust another man.

The Question

For this blog I will be looking at a very important question. How does abuse effect teenagers ability to trust? Also do teenagers that have been abused trust the people that they knew before the abuse?

Introduction

This blog is about life after sexual abuse. Abuse is hard enough at that time but it effects you long afterwards because I know at least for me that after going through that I have trust issues. This blog will be me talking to other formerly abused kids to figure out how they veiw trust I will be asking them as an opening line "when I say the word Trust what comes to your mind?" . Also how they trust and see if they will open up to me about there past.