Was I Abused as a Child Quiz
How the Scales are Structured
Who Usually Takes This Test?
See How You Compare
Below is a preview of how scores are typically distributed across each scale.
Example Questions From the Test
- Discipline did not involve pain, dangerous exertion, or withholding basic bodily needs.
- A punishment sometimes caused avoidable physical discomfort that felt excessive.
- I was repeatedly made to hold painful positions, perform exhausting tasks, or go without sleep, food, water, or bathroom access.
- A punishment caused injury, collapse, serious deprivation, or an immediate threat to my physical safety.
- Someone requested or shared sexual material in a way that felt inappropriate, but stopped when I declined.
- Someone pressured me repeatedly to view, make, send, or keep sexual material secret.
- Nothing sexual involving pictures, recordings, messages, or secrecy was requested of me.
- Someone coerced, threatened, exploited, or secretly recorded me in connection with sexual material.
- An older or more powerful person introduced it as a game or request that left me uncertain or uncomfortable.
- No one expected or asked this of me.
- Someone pressured me through guilt, persistence, rewards, or misuse of trust.
- Someone used force, threats, blackmail, authority, or fear of harm to make me do it.
Was I Abused as a Child Quiz - Description and methodology of the test
For adults and older teens revisiting confusing childhood experiences, this childhood experiences assessment offers a structured way to examine safety, care, boundaries, and coercion. The Was I Abused as a Child Quiz organizes memories without forcing an immediate label. Its sexual-boundary questions address pressure, secrecy, sexual material, and unwanted contact while keeping emotional and physical context visible.
What This Assessment Explores
Questions cover controlling care, unmet emotional support, painful discipline, deprivation, threats, peer harm, sexualized material, secrecy, pressure, and unwanted contact involving adults or powerful peers. An emotional care assessment considers caregiver responses, without reducing the instrument to parental abuse.
The result organizes the material into three displayed dimensions:
- Emotional Control and Unmet Care (0-15) measures unmet emotional care or controlling/coercive responses: No items selected (0), Worth exploring (1-2), Act on the concern (3-15).
- Physical Force and Safety (0-15) measures harmful force or inadequate protection: None endorsed (0), Worth exploring (1-2), Act on concern (3-15).
- Sexual Boundaries (0-15) measures sexualized exposure or boundary violations: No experiences endorsed (0), Worth exploring (1-2), Act on the concern (3-15).
Rather than giving a childhood verdict, the questionnaire narrows concerns into care, safety, and boundary dimensions; a zero means only that listed experiences were not endorsed.
Methodology and Scientific Basis
This structured self-report uses response descriptions ranging from appropriate care or no relevant experience through uncertainty, pressure, coercion, danger, or harm. The respondent chooses wording closest to memory, and answers are grouped into displayed dimensions. Because point contributions are not stated, ranges should not be reverse-engineered into severity.
Sexual-boundary items address unwanted touching, sexualisation, pressure, secrecy, and coercion. This sexual boundary assessment considers those experiences without reducing the result to one label.
CECA.Q is the closest conceptual comparison for combined childhood care and abuse themes; this questionnaire is conceptually consistent with those domains, not an adaptation of it. The broader Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire and Childhood Trauma Questionnaire organize related victimization and adversity domains. These published instruments are comparison frameworks, not evidence of standardized administration or validation for this online questionnaire.
The bands are unvalidated reflective summaries, not clinical or legal cutoffs, and the questionnaire cannot confirm or rule out abuse. Memory gaps, current distress, family context, self-awareness, and response bias can affect self-report; a single red-flag response overrides the total and warrants qualified support or an appropriate protection service.
- Finkelhor, D., Hamby, S. L., Ormrod, R., & Turner, H. (2005). The Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire: Reliability, validity, and national norms. Child Abuse & Neglect, 29(4), 383-412. 10.1016/j.chiabu.2004.11.001
- Bernstein, D. P., Stein, J. A., Newcomb, M. D., Walker, E., Pogge, D., Ahluvalia, T., Stokes, J., Handelsman, L., Medrano, M., Desmond, D., & Zule, W. (2003). Development and validation of a brief screening version of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. Child Abuse & Neglect, 27(2), 169-190. 10.1016/S0145-2134(02)00541-0
- Bifulco, A., Bernazzani, O., Moran, P. M., & Jacobs, C. (2005). The childhood experience of care and abuse questionnaire (CECA.Q): Validation in a community series. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 44(4), 563-581. 10.1348/014466505X35344
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