ABSTRACT
The last decade has seen an increasing interest in the topic of violence as a health issue. Stories of physical and sexual abuse emerge from all ethnic and socioeconomic groups. The obvious physical and psychological trauma is not difficult to imagine. The medical literature on the correlation between sexual and/or physical abuse and psychiatric illness is extensive. In a study comparing women with somatization disorder and women with affective disorder, Morrison found that the two groups reported similar sexual experiences except that significantly more women with somatization disorder had been molested as children. In a review on the topic of somatoform disorders in victims of incest and child abuse, Loewenstein concludes that the evidence seems compelling that an antecedent history of childhood sexual abuse should be studied as one of the important environmental factors related to the development of somatization disorder.
