Aile İçi İstismarda (Ensest) Çocukluklarının Gölgesinde Kadınlar.

Family is a social institution essentially based on love and trust, in contrast being a phenomenon included violence in almost all societies throughout history. Family has been defined as a social institution providing its members with love, trust, and a sense of belonging. Family has been also described as a secure environment; however, it can admit various crimes and human rights violations. Therefore, it should be approaching to the concept of family with rather than its most ideal form, with considering how safe the individuals living within the family are. Instead of being expected to be the safest spaces for its members, the family institution can sometimes turn into places where traumas of children, women, the elderly, and people with disabilities are concealed. Therefore, both of laws and the level of awareness in society regarding the family institution need to be high. While children and women, likewise many disadvantaged groups, have been becoming the subjects of abuse within this institution, a magical silence in there can overshadow the abuse so much that hiding it from view. Incest, especially against children, has been one of the significant social issues having a potential risk in all societies. Being a shape of domestic violence with low apparent, it has been selected as the subject of the study. Since girls at most have been primarily exposed to incest crime, a sexual abuse/violence within the family that its perpetrators try to conceal the crime with threats and violence, women who had childhood sexual abuse history within the family were included in the study. Boys who experienced sexual abuse within the family during their childhoods were not included in the study. Therefore, the study has been focused on women who experienced abuse during their childhoods. While the universe of the research constitutes the Catharsis program hosted by Clinical Psychologist Gökhan Çınar, the sample consists of women experienced childhood sexual abuse within the family who participated in the Catharsis program between January 1, 2020, and December 25, 2023. 10 programs have been evaluated in this study. These issued programs are participations of women who are asked to evaluate the effects of their experiences of the childhood sexual abuse within their families during their childhood on their lives from their own perspectives. The study has analyzed the responses of the participants to the program host, their understanding of the situation, definition, ways of coping with it, and the effects on their lives and subjected them to content analysis. In this context, four main themes have been identified through the analysis of participants' statements, and these themes have been further divided into 10 categories. Women in the program experienced sexual abuse during their childhoods, which they did not understand and could not interpret. The prominent points emerged from the study have been that incest crime within the family has been defined by perpetrators as a "game," kept as "a secret," which pushes victims to blame/condemn themselves and leaves them alone in dealing with the abuse. While fear and pressure have been used as the most convenient way to conceal incest crime, women who experienced the childhood sexual abuse as children have been observed to lose their futures in the details of the trauma they experienced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]