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Issues in Defining Child Sexual Abuse

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New International Frontiers in Child Sexual Abuse

Part of the book series: Child Maltreatment ((MALT,volume 7))

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Abstract

This chapter provides a brief historical overview of the social context of child sexual abuse, focusing on themes of ignorance, recognition and suppression. It relates these themes to recent and current debates about the nature of child sexual abuse. It reviews international policy and prevalence study approaches to the definition of child sexual abuse, identifying different interpretations of the concept and focusing on three major dimensions of variance. It then analyses the concept of child sexual abuse and provides a recommended conceptual model and definition. The key message from this Chapter is that child sexual abuse should be considered to exist when: (1) the person is a child (from either or both developmental and legal standpoints); (2) there is no true consent (due either to lack of capacity to provide consent, or presence of capacity but lack of consent in fact); (3) the acts are sexual (being contact or non-contact acts done to seek or obtain physical or mental sexual gratification, whether immediate or deferred in time or space, or otherwise legitimately experienced by the child as a sexual act); and (4) the acts constitute abuse (due to the presence of a relationship of power, the child’s position of inequality, and the exploitation of the child’s vulnerability).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    R v R [1991] 4 All ER 481.

  2. 2.

    Early theoretical work about sexual harassment animated its recognition in US jurisprudence in Meritor Savings Bank v Vinson, 477 U.S. 57 (1986), where the Supreme Court held sexual harassment can create a “hostile working environment” constituting unlawful discrimination under the Civil Rights Act 1964.

  3. 3.

    Biographers posited that this forced period of silence was the background to Angelou developing a love of literature, and an exceptional ability to listen and observe the world (Gillespie et al., 2008).

  4. 4.

    The so-called “parental alienation syndrome” centred around this falsehood causes particular damage. While scientifically discredited, it continues to have pernicious effects, where considered by misinformed family court judges. These problems have been extensively documented: see Clemente & Padilla-Racero, 2016; Dallam & Silberg, 2016; Geffner, 2016; Kleinman, 2016; Nichols, 2014; O’Donohue et al., 2016).

  5. 5.

    See Chap. 1.

  6. 6.

    Bolen and Scannapieco (1999) identified three aspects in which definitions varied: an upper age limit at which sexual abuse occurred (varying from 15 to 17); the level of contact qualifying an incident as child sexual abuse (ranging from penetrative acts only, through a broad spectrum to whether the respondent experienced “unwanted acts” or “sexual things”); and whether the study restricted child sexual abuse to acts by a person of a set age difference (ranging from no restriction, to offenders aged at least 3–5 years older, to adults only). They did not consider different approaches to consent.

  7. 7.

    The ACE-IQ asks four questions, as follows: 1. Did someone touch or fondle you in a sexual way when you did not want them to? 2. Did someone make you touch their body in a sexual way when you did not want them to? 3. Did someone attempt oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse with you when you did not want them to? 4. Did someone actually have oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse with you when you did not want them to? Accessible at: http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/activities/adverse_childhood_experiences/en/

  8. 8.

    Ondersma et al. (2001, p. 711) seemed to accommodate individual variance in capacity to consent by resorting to the bedrock assumption that there are societal beliefs that children do not possess the maturity to provide true consent, and require protection from those who would exploit that vulnerability.

  9. 9.

    There are of course exceptions to this, such as emergency medical treatment, and unavoidable incidental bodily contact in society, e.g., brushing against a person in a crowded train.

  10. 10.

    There are potential exceptions to this; for example, a developmentally advanced adolescent girl who is about to turn 18, who is in a relationship with a young man who has just turned 18, where the girl is as or more cognitively, emotionally, psychosocially and sexually advanced than the man.

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Mathews, B. (2019). Issues in Defining Child Sexual Abuse. In: New International Frontiers in Child Sexual Abuse. Child Maltreatment, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99043-9_2

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