Abuse, Child Sexual

Child sexual abuse refers to adult sexual contact with children under the legal age of consent. Whereas caretaker neglect and physical violence against children became major social problems during the 1960s, the sexual violation of children by adults became a focus for public concern from the 1970s to the present. In large measure, this resulted from attention generated by feminist activists and scholars concerned with the psychic and physical well-being of young people reared within sexist or male-dominated social environments. Whereas some non-Western societies permit, or even foster, limited ritual sexual contact between adults and young people, in contemporary Western society nearly all forms of sexual interaction between adults and children are thought of as harmful to children, even when children are said to consent to acts of sex with adults. This is because children are materially, socially, and emotionally dependent upon adult caretakers and, as such, are viewed as never entirely free to choose sex with adults who hold power over them. Thus, in the United States and other Western countries, it is a violation of criminal law for adults to engage sexually with youth below the age of 16, with or without a child's consent.

Although illegal, adult sexual relations with children are not entirely uncommon. Data analyzed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services indicate that 10 percent of approximately 3 million cases of alleged child abuse reported in 2004 involved violations of a sexual nature. This figure rose to 16 percent of all reported cases of abuse when considering children ages 12 to 16. While the most damaging forms of child sexual abuse involve coercion and rape, statistically speaking, far more typical are nonviolent, noncoital sexual exchanges between a child and an adult known to the child. Three quarters of all known cases of child sexual abuse involve offenders who were friends or neighbors of a victim's families. Surveys of college students report even higher [Page 9]findings, with 11.3 percent of women and 4.1 percent of men reporting having had sex with an adult (18 years or older) while they were under age 13. When sexual abuse or “incest” takes place within the family, surveys indicate that about three quarters of the time the offender is an adult relative, while about one quarter of those surveyed report sexual contact with a father or stepfather. Unfortunately, much of what is known about childhood sexual abuse is based on small clinical studies and surveys of middle-class and mostly white college populations. There is also considerable variation in the estimated incidence of child sexual abuse, although most researchers agree that the vast majority of perpetrators are males and that young women are about 4 times more likely to be victimized than young men.

Many victims of child sexual abuse experience long-lasting bodily and emotional problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder, sleeplessness, depression, eating and anxiety disorders, and difficulties in later establishing meaningful adult sexual relations. Since the mid-1980s, concern with these problems has been amplified by sensational media coverage of father-daughter incest, as well as the sexual abuse of children by educators and coaches in schools and day care centers and by priests and ministers in churches. Dramatic cases of child abduction by strangers and equally dramatic, although often undocumented, reports of ritual and satanic abuse have also fueled public fears. Sometimes reports of abuse are shrouded in controversy. This is particularly the case with regard to “recovered memories” of traumatic sexual violations said to have occurred in the distant past. In such cases, awareness of abuse is said to be repressed until brought to consciousness by suggestive therapeutic techniques, such as hypnotic regression or trance-like imaging.

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