Disclosure and reporting

Disclosure and reporting

Victims of child sexual abuse take a long time to tell and most never report. According to the National Survey, 38% of victims never told anyone, and of those who told, 31% did so within a year, 20% after two to ten years and 48% took more than ten years (UC, 2022). According to the Foundation’s weighted calculation on the survey dataset, only 9 in 100 victims reported to Carabineros (Chile’s uniformed police), the PDI (Policía de Investigaciones, Chile’s investigative police) or the Public Prosecutor’s Office (Ministerio Público) (policy brief).

In Spain, the 2019 Macro-survey on Violence against Women (Macroencuesta) found that only 11.1% of cases of sexual violence outside a partner relationship suffered by women aged 16 or over, at any age, were reported to the police or the courts, by the women themselves or by others. Among those who did not report, the most frequently cited reason was having been a girl or under 18 at the time of the events, in 35.4% of cases (Macroencuesta 2019).

A systematic review of 27 quantitative studies published between 2000 and 2022 identified 17 factors associated with a child telling about the abuse (Abdul Latiff et al., 2024). A Canadian study of 164 police cases showed that disclosure is delayed further when the perpetrator is close to the child, the abuse is serious and repeated, and the victim is younger (Wallis and Woodworth, 2020). A bill that raises the cost of reporting acts on victims who already face those barriers and on the adults around them.