Abstract
<jats:p>In 2024, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported that 1 in 8 women (370 million) experienced sexual assault before the age of 18 years, and 8% of these are from East and Southeast Asia.1 In Singapore, 38.6% of 11,868 sexual assault cases from 2018 to 2022 involved children aged under 16 years.2 These children are at risk of pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and post-assault trauma in the short term, and face wide-ranging long-term psychosocial and health consequences, including psychiatric disorders and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection.3 A systematic review of children and adolescents exposed to sexual abuse found that STI detection varied from <1% to 61% in different settings and by type of STI.4 In a Singapore review of 790 patients aged 0 to 16 years who presented to a paediatric emergency department (ED) for sexual abuse/assault from 2016 to 2020, 6.2% had an STI, with the majority having chlamydia followed by gonorrhoea.5</jats:p>