Definitions

Definitions

Child sexual abuse figures differ between studies largely because they measure different things. The global study published in The Lancet in 2025 defines sexual violence against children as any unwanted intercourse or other sexual contact, physically forced or coerced, before the age of 18, regardless of the relationship with the perpetrator, and it excludes non-contact abuse and online abuse (Cagney et al., 2025). Fang et al. (2026) report contact violence separately from violence that includes non-contact forms.

The National Survey on Sexual Abuse and Childhood Adversity, conducted by the CUIDA UC Centre and Fundación para la Confianza with 2,101 people aged 18 to 65 in 13 regions, defines child sexual abuse as abuse committed against a person under 18 by someone aged 12 or over. It distinguishes touching under manipulation, deception, subjugation or force; touching of the genital area; oral, anal or vaginal penetration; and non-contact abuse (CNN Chile, 2022).

Fundación para la Confianza works with a broader definition, proposed by José Andrés Murillo (Murillo, 2020, p. 436) and used in a Foundation study on the impact of child sexual abuse on the well-being of adults (Murillo et al., 2021). It understands child sexual abuse as a process and not only as an act, and grounds it in the asymmetry of power rather than in age or physical force:

“Child sexual abuse is any act and process of acts in which a child or adolescent is exposed to or involved in any sexualised activity, using the asymmetry conferred by authority, trust, dependence (emotional, social or economic), power, force, fear, culture, capacity for understanding, need or other vulnerabilities, manipulating, confusing, eliminating or vitiating consent. These acts may include, although they are not limited to this list: genital touching; oral, vaginal or anal penetration, with a penis, fingers or other objects; touching of other erogenous parts of the body; inciting the child to touch others, masturbation, voyeurism, exposure to sexual situations, pornography, abuse, rape. Both the actions, tactics and strategies of preparation for these acts (in-person or online grooming) and those of silencing and discrediting the victim and those around them also form part of the process of sexual abuse.”

For the legislative debate there is a second distinction that the international literature uses and the bill does not: between a false report, made knowing that the events did not occur, and an unsubstantiated report, which could not be proved. The review by Schemmel et al. (2026) also separates a third category, that of cases that remain unresolved because suspicion persists but no decision was reached.