Child sex abuse response history
By 1968 44 out of 50 U.S. states had enacted mandatory laws that required physicians to report cases of suspicious child abuse. Legal action began to become more prevalent in the 1970s with the enactment of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act in 1974 in conjunction with the creation of the National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect. Since the creation of the Child Abuse and Treatment Act, reported child abuse cases have increased dramatically. Finally, the National Abuse Coalition was created in 1979 to create pressure in congress to create more sexual abuse laws.
1981
Judith Herman is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Director of Training at the Victims of Violence Program in the Department of Psychiatry at the Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a founding member of the Women’s Mental Health Collective.
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Herman, Judith Lewis (1997) [1992]. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: BasicBooks. ISBN 978-0-465-08730-3.
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Herman, Judith Lewis (2000) [1981]. Father-daughter Incest. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-07651-8.
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Herman, Judith Lewis. (2023) Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice. London: Basic Books.ISBN 978-1-5416-0054-6 [15]
1986, 1988
David Finkelhor began studying the child abuse problems of child victimization, child maltreatment and family violence in 1977. He is known for his conceptual and empirical work on the problem of child sexual abuse, reflected in publications such as Sourcebook on Child Sexual Abuse (Sage, 1986) and Nursery Crimes (Sage, 1988).
Finkelhor graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1964, then attended Harvard College, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Relations in 1968. While at Harvard, he took courses at the Institut d’Études Politiques, University of Paris in 1967. He earned his M. Ed. in 1971 from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and he received his Ph.D. in Sociology from University of New Hampshire in 1978 where he studied under Murray A. Straus.
Anne Hastings described these changes in attitudes towards child sexual abuse as “the beginning of one of history’s largest social revolutions.”[288]
According to John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor B.J. Cling:
By the early 21st century, the issue of child sexual abuse has become a legitimate focus of professional attention, while increasingly separated from second wave feminism … As child sexual abuse becomes absorbed into the larger field of interpersonal trauma studies, child sexual abuse studies and intervention strategies have become degendered and largely unaware of their political origins in modern feminism and other vibrant political movements of the 1970s. One may hope that unlike in the past, this rediscovery of child sexual abuse that began in the 70s will not again be followed by collective amnesia. The institutionalization of child maltreatment interventions in federally funded centers, national and international societies, and a host of research studies (in which the United States continues to lead the world) offers grounds for cautious optimism. Nevertheless, as Judith Herman argues cogently, ‘The systematic study of psychological trauma … depends on the support of a political movement.’[289]
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1998
A 1998 meta-analysis by Bruce Rind et al. generated controversy by suggesting that child sexual abuse does not always cause pervasive harm, that girls were more likely to be psychologically harmed than boys, that some college students reported such encounters as positive experiences and that the extent of psychological damage depends on whether or not the child described the encounter as “consensual”.[76] The study was criticized for flawed methodology and conclusions.[77][78] The US Congress condemned the study for its conclusions and for providing material used by pedophile organizations to justify their activities.
Doctors for Sexual Abuse Care were the organisers of a controversial Auckland conference in September 1998 for the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect. A series of postings on the internet were made about this conference and its participants by a COSA supporter.