NEW YORK - More than one in eight high-school-age boys said they have been physically or sexually abused, with the highest rates of both found among Asian-Americans and Hispanics, The New York Times reported Friday.
A new study, based on questionnaires filled out by 3,162 boys in grades five to 12 in nearly 300 schools across the nation, found that physical abuse of boys was far more common than sexual abuse, the Times reported.
Two-thirds of the physical abuse was by a family member in the home, the study found.
Abuse was reported the most by Asian-American boys: 9% reported sexual abuse and 17% reported physical abuse. And 7% of Hispanic boys said they had been sexually abused while 13% said they had been physically abused.
Among blacks and whites, the reported sexual abuse rate was 3%; 10% of blacks and 8% of whites said they had been physically abused.
'We were surprised by these differences between ethnic groups,'' said Cathy Schoen, an author of the study. ''We didn't find those ethnic differences when we looked at abuse among girls.''
The study, conducted by Louis Harris and Associates for The Commonwealth Fund, compared boys' responses with those collected in a matching sample of girls whose responses were analyzed in a report last fall.
Almost half of the abused boys said they had not talked to anyone about it, compared with 29% of the abused girls.
And one in five adolescent boys said there had been a time when he needed medical care but did not get it, with uninsured or abused boys most likely to have been in that situation.
The questionnaires did not define abuse, asking simply whether the respondent had ever been sexually or physically abused.
The survey, conducted from December 1996 through June 1997, had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points for the boys overall; the percentage was higher for individual ethnic groups.
By The Associated Press