When I was 6 or 7, I was at a party and ended up playing with a kid around the same age as me. At some point he led me into an empty room, kissed me, and kissed all over my stomach. I was completely frozen, scared, and overwhelmed, and I think I was tearing up. I cried afterward and felt disgusting, guilty, and violated for months. Around that same time, I became hypersexual and started masturbating a lot. I've been calling what happened to me COCSA, and the label feels right to me. But I'm also questioning it because of how young we both were. Is COCSA the right label for what happened?

Thank you for trusting us with this. The fact that you've already found a word that feels right to you matters enormously and I want to honor that before I say anything else.

COCSA stands for child-on-child sexual abuse, and it refers to sexual contact between children where one child experiences it as unwanted, harmful, or distressing. One of the most common questions survivors of these experiences have is exactly what you're asking: does the label still apply when both children were very young and around the same age? The short answer is yes, it can. COCSA does not require a significant age gap. What researchers and clinicians look at is the presence of coercion, the absence of consent, and the distress the experience caused. Your account seems to have all of those.

You described being led somewhere by him, which already removes the element of mutual choice. Power between children does not come only from age. It can come from confidence, from being the one who initiates, from leading another child into an unfamiliar situation before they have any idea what is happening or how to respond. You were frozen. You were tearing up. You cried for months and carried feelings of being disgusting and violated. A 6 or 7 year old does not generate that kind of sustained distress from an experience that felt safe or welcome.

Your body sounds like it went into a freeze response, which is one of the most well-documented trauma responses and also one of the most misunderstood. Freezing is what happens when the nervous system becomes so overwhelmed that it cannot move, speak, or act. It is the body trying to protect you when fighting back or running away are not available options. Freezing is not agreement. It is not passivity or permission. It was never consent.

The hypersexuality and increased masturbation you noticed around the same time are clinically recognized responses to early sexual trauma in young children. When a child's body and mind are exposed to sexual contact before they are developmentally ready, the mind sometimes responds by becoming preoccupied with sexuality as a way of trying to process something overwhelming. It is not a character flaw. It is not evidence that you wanted what happened. It is a sign of impact.

The guilt and disgust you carried for months make sense as a response, but they landed in the wrong place. Children who experience COCSA almost universally feel responsible for what happened, and almost universally, that sense of responsibility is not deserved. You were six years old. You did not know what was coming. You could not have consented to something you did not understand, and you had no tools to stop it. The guilt belongs to a situation that should never have happened, not to the child it happened to.

The age of the other child is worth holding with some care. He was the same age as you, and at 6 or 7, children do not have full understanding of consent or the effect their actions have on others. He may have been acting out something he had been exposed to himself. None of that changes what the experience was for you. Both things can be true simultaneously: he was a young child who may not have fully understood what he was doing, and what happened to you was real, unwanted, and harmful.

You said the label feels right, and also not entirely right at the same time. That mixed feeling is incredibly common. Many people spend years questioning whether their experience was serious enough, whether the other child being young changes things, whether they are even allowed to use the word. You are allowed to use it. If it helps you understand what happened, it is yours. If it ever stops fitting, you can set it down.

If you haven't yet worked with a trauma-informed therapist, that could be a meaningful next step. An approach worth knowing about is EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It is specifically designed to help people process difficult memories without having to relive them in painful detail, and it can be especially useful for experiences that feel more like body sensations than stories you can easily put into words. RAINN also offers free, confidential support for survivors of childhood sexual harm at rainn.org or 1-800-656-4673. And the Our Wave community includes many people who have asked questions very close to yours, which can itself be grounding to know.

What happened to you was not okay, and you did not deserve it. Whatever you decide to call it, it happened, it mattered, and you do not have to keep carrying it alone.