Early-life adversity accelerates the maturation of affect-related circuitry, which might be a short-term adaptation with long-term tradeoffs. Sexual trauma is associated with a particularly strong impact on pubertal development and mental health outcomes. Our objective was to test the relations between trauma type, affective network maturity, and mental health outcomes in young women with trauma history. Trauma-exposed women aged 18–29 completed a clinical interview (n = 35) and an fMRI scan (n = 28). We used a public data set to train a machine learning algorithm to predict age from resting-state affective network connectivity and calculated network maturity as the difference between predicted and true age. We also performed principal component analysis on mental health outcomes and retained two components: clinical and state psychological outcomes. Compared to nonsexual trauma (n = 17), sexual trauma (n = 11) was associated with greater affective network maturity. In addition, for sexual trauma only, greater affective network maturity was associated with better clinical but not state psychological outcomes. These results suggest that sexual trauma during development might uniquely alter the maturational trajectory of affect-related circuitry, with distinct mental health consequences in emerging adulthood. Whereas delayed affective network maturation is associated with adverse clinical outcomes, accelerated affective network maturation might confer resilience in survivors.

A tropology of moral injury and corruption long framed the plight of the sex crime victim. Nineteenth-century psychiatric acknowledgment of adverse sexual experience reflected general trends in etiological thought, especially on ‘epileptic’ and hysteric seizures, but on the whole remained descriptive, guarded and limited. Various experiential threats to the modern sexual self beyond assault and rape were granted etiological significance, however: illegitimate motherhood, masturbatory guilt, sexual enlightenment, ‘homosexual seduction’ and chance encounters leading to fetishistic fixation. These minor early appeals to medical psychology help us appreciate the multiple nuances of ‘sexual trauma’ advanced in Breuer and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria (1895) and Freud’s subsequent work.