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Trauma and Sexuality: The Effects of Childhood Sexual, Physical, and Emotional Abuse on Sexual Identity and Behavior.

E F. Howell.

Haworth. 2002.

ISBN: 0789020424.

Trauma and Sexuality examines how early maltreatment shapes adult sexual identity, orientation, behaviours, and fantasies, with the explicit aim of helping clinicians adopt a nonjudgmental, trauma-informed stance. The volume is directed especially at counsellors, psychotherapists, and other helping professionals.Its stated goal is to expand clinical sensitivity and expertise by offering a non-judgmental framework for understanding how long-standing early abuse can profoundly affect clients’ sexual identities, orientations, behaviours, and fantasies.

Several ideas from the volume have influenced later trauma-and-sexuality discourse:

•Trauma-informed, nonjudgmental framing: The book encourages clinicians to view puzzling or stigmatized sexual presentations (e.g., compulsivity, high-risk behaviour, orientation conflicts) as potentially rooted in early relational trauma rather than moral failing or simple paraphilia.

•Dissociation and gender/sexual self-states: Howell’s chapter advances the view that victims may internalize abuser-related self-states dissociatively, contributing to gendered identities and sexual scripts that persist into adulthood.

•Developmental pathways: By integrating sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, the volume underscores how multiple maltreatment types interact to shape sexual development, trust, body experience, and erotic conditioning.

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