[Psychosocial consequences of sexual abuse]

Violence is what the victims experience as violence. Only they are able to measure what oppression, injury, pain or sexual violence can cause. Violence starts where human beings are constrained, humiliated, abjected and injured in their self-determination by other human beings. The experienced violence causes a trauma in most cases and in many cases also a PTSD. As a lot of epidemiological studies have affirmed, the highest lifetime-prevalence of PTSD appears after one respectively after a repeated act of sexual violence.It is important to define the circumstances of the action, by defining three fields of violence: domestic sexual violence, sexual violence in civil everyday life respectively violence, that occurs not inside families and sexual violence in wartime.Victims of all fields of violence can be found in Western Europe, the last mentioned form of violence predominant among refugees, but also among survivors of the last world war.