Investigating Sexual Abuse: Findings of a 15‐Year Longitudinal Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background There is a lack of longitudinal large‐scale studies of sexual abuse in intellectual disability services. Such studies offer opportunities to examine patterns in disclosure, investigation and outcomes, and to report on incidence and trends. Methods All allegations of sexual abuse (n = 250) involving service users as victims or perpetrators of sexual abuse over a 15‐year period in a large Irish community‐based service were analysed based on the data extracted from extensive contemporaneous case notes. Results Victims or families were the most common concern raisers of abuse. Following multidisciplinary investigation, almost half (47%) of all allegations of sexual abuse were confirmed (n = 118). In confirmed episodes, more than half the perpetrators were adolescents and adults with intellectual disabilities, while almost a quarter were relatives. The most common type of abuse was sexual touch, although 31% of episodes involved penetration or attempted penetration. The most common location was the family home, followed by the day service and public places. A notable feature was the variation in the incidence of abuse over the study period, largely caused by episodes of multiple abuse. Conclusions The incidence of confirmed episodes of sexual abuse of adults with intellectual disabilities may be higher than previously estimated. There is an urgent need for statutory guidelines, which require reporting of adult abuse, and provide protection for bona fide whistle blowers, similar to existing child protection legislation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".