Parental Abandonment of Children: Vulnerability to Sexual Abuse
Chapter 6.
Abstract
Parental abandonment of children cannot be held as a causal factor of child sexual abuse (CSA). However, in Grenada as in the rest of the Caribbean, where children from impoverished families are often abandoned by one or both parents for a variety of reasons, these children may become exposed to sexual predators who take advantage of unsupervised children’s vulnerability by forcing them into sexual activity at increasingly younger ages.
She thought of the children who had been born in this village and who would never be able to … satisfy or explain the nameless feeling that would come upon them, in the midst of their adulthood, perhaps waking from an afternoon’s sleep, or walking along a road, or upon entering a stranger’s house (Anne Michaels, The Winter’s Vault).