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A new study has found that almost half of boys and girls in special secondary schools have been sexually abused.
The study of 61 girls and 55 boys aged 11 to 17 at two South Island special schools found that 44 per cent of both genders had been subject to abuse ranging from "rude games" to rape.
The author, South Australian Professor Freda Briggs, said the study showed that children with learning or other disabilities were far more vulnerable to abuse than mainstream children.
But she was unable to establish the extent to which the children were abused because they were disabled and their abusers thought they could get away with it, or alternatively suffered from mental and learning disabilities because they had been abused.
"It's probably a bit of both," she said.
Professor Briggs, who has advised the police on their "keeping ourselves safe" programme in schools since 1985, asked the children an open-ended question about what experience they had had of "rude behaviour".
She focused on special schools because in an earlier study of mainstream intermediate schools she found that 81 per cent of girls with severe learning problems had been sexually abused, compared with 4 per cent of other girls.
The children in the two special schools she surveyed were all at least three years behind their mainstream peers in their education and had low intellectual ability.
But under Government policy they were all due to be returned to mainstream schools near their family homes after two years.
The girls had all done a keeping ourselves safe programme 18 months before. The boys had not done the course at their special school, although some had done it at their previous primary schools.
In contrast, the earlier survey that found 81 per cent of girls with learning disabilities had been abused was based on interviews done within a few weeks of doing the programme.
In the latest study, abuse of girls included oral and vaginal rape by stepfathers, older brothers, mothers' boyfriends, an uncle and a girl's adult brother.
Abuse of boys included sexual intercourse with older females, masturbation by a female babysitter and being required to provide oral and anal sex for males.
Just over half (54 per cent) of the abuse was by older youths who used younger children mainly to help them masturbate or provide oral sex.
But only two of the boys had told anyone about the abuse.
"They didn't think they would be believed, they thought they would be labelled as gay and there would be violent repercussions from the perpetrator," Professor Briggs said.
She said the programme needed to be adapted for children with learning disabilities.
She praised the "activity-based learning" used to teach the programme in the girls' school, which was more suited to their intellectual level than the mainstream programme.
"In a mainstream school these children would just be lost because teachers with large classes can't provide that reinforcement," she said.
Her survey found that 47 per cent of the students experienced more violence in mainstream schools than in the special schools, against 34 per cent who experienced more in the special schools.
However, the director of advocacy for IHC, Trish Grant, said the study showed the value of "inclusive education" in mainstream schools, rather than being "secluded" with "strangers" in special schools.
The director of Nelson's Salisbury Special School for girls, Ritchie Telfer, said he was surprised at the level of abuse but Professor Briggs had "a huge amount of credibility".
