Child Sexual Abuse

Child sexual abuse is a significant public health problem not only in the United States but around the world. In the United States, one out of three females and one out of five males have been victims of sexual abuse before the age of eighteen. Sexual abuse occurs across all ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, and religious groups. Unfortunately, sexual abuse is a relatively common experience in the lives of children. A report released by the National Institute of Justice in 1997 revealed that of the 22.3 million children between the ages of twelve and seventeen in the United States, 1.8 million were victims of serious sexual assault or abuse. There are gender differences with regard to sexual abuse incidents; specifically, girls are two times as likely as boys to experience sexual victimization during childhood, and they are at eight times the risk during adolescence. Because significant physical, emotional, social, cognitive, and behavioral problems are related to this type of childhood trauma, the need to more effectively address the issue of child sexual abuse has become paramount.

There are a number of commonly held misconceptions regarding child sexual abuse in the United States. These include the following: Sexual abuse is limited to sexual intercourse between an adult and a child; the perpetrator of the sexual abuse is always a stranger; and rape occurs with adult women, not children. These beliefs are false. Sexual abuse involves a range of activities including noncontact and contact offenses (see Table 1); stranger abuse comprises only a small percentage of total victimizations; and children are approximately three times more likely than adults to be victims of rape. In fact, among females, almost 30 percent of all forcible rapes occur before the age of eleven, and another 32 percent occur between the ages of eleven and seventeen.

While legal and scholarly definitions of child sexual abuse differ, the most common definition of this kind of abuse is any sexual activity involving a child where consent is not or cannot be given. Sexual contact between an adult and a minor child, as well as that between an older and a younger child, are both examples of sexual abuse. Depending upon the age at which a state deems a child capable of giving consent, sexual abuse between two minors can also occur. For example, Texas law states that if there is greater than a three-year age difference between children the contact can be considered sexual abuse. It is important to note that despite legal definitions and research criteria, the impact of a forced or coerced sexual activity can be devastating to a child, even if the action cannot be legally or academically described as sexual abuse.

All states require some kind of mandated child abuse reporting. Reporting laws most often require specified professionals (e.g., physicians, teachers) who have contact with children to report to law enforcement, the department of social services, or child protection agencies incidents in which abuse is suspected. These laws were developed in order to better protect children. There is variation from state to state about who is mandated to report and what abuse acts require reporting. For example, according to California Penal Code there are two categories of sexual abuse that are reportable: sexual assault and sexual exploitation. According to the code, sexual assault includes rape and rape in concert; oral copulation and sodomy; lewd and lascivious acts upon a child under the age of fourteen; penetration of a genital and/or anal opening by a foreign object; and child molestation. Sexual exploitation includes conduct involving matter depicting minors engaged in obscene acts; promoting, aiding, or assisting a minor to engage in prostitution, a live performance involving obscene sexual conduct, or posing for a pictorial depiction involving obscene conduct for commercial purposes; and depicting a child in or knowingly developing a pictorial depiction in which a child engages in obscene sexual conduct.

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