I comportamenti sessualizzati dei bambini nel contesto scolastico

This research proposes to give indications on sexual and sexualized behavior in the school context, adopting as a reference the research conducted by Friedrich with mothers (Friedrich, Grambsch, Broughton, Kuiper, & Beilke, 1991; Friedrich, Grambsch, Damon, Hewitt, Koverola, Lang, Wolfe, & Broughton, 1992; Friedrich, 1993a; Friedrich, 1993b; Friedrich, 1995; Friedrich, Fisher, Broughton, Houston, & Shafran, 1998; Friedrich, Fisher, Dittner, Acton, Berliner, Butler, Damon, Davies, Gray, & Wright, 2001), to identify those unusual and infrequent aspects of child sexuality which could represent risk indicators. The sample is composed of 334 children aged between 5 and 11 years (average age: 8 years), of whom 49% are boys and 51% girls, observed by nursery school and elementary school teachers with the Child Sexual Behavior Inventory-3 (C.S.B.I-3) by W. Friedrich (Friedrich, 1995; Friedrich, Fisher, Broughton, Houston, & Shafran, 1998). The results show that very rare items in Friedrich’s normative sample like: Puts mouth on another child’s/adult’s sex parts (item 11) and Puts objects in vagina or rectum (item 18) are never observed at school and that, for this reason, they represent behaviors which are unusual or extraneous to the normal development of child sexuality. It also emerges that contact with children of the same age and exchanges with other children of the opposite sex within the school context encourage more frequent occurrences of some normal or rare and exhibitionist sexual manifestations than happens in the family context.