Factsheets: Child Sexual Abuse: Defining the Problem

• What is child sexual abuse?
• Who is affected by child sexual abuse?
• Approaching the Problem
• Child Sexual Abuse as a Mental Health Issue
• Child Sexual Abuse as a Public Health Issue
• Child Sexual Abuse as a Family Violence Issue
• Child Sexual Abuse as a Human Rights Issue

What is child sexual abuse?

Child sexual abuse is the sexual use of a child by someone with more power. The vast majority of child sexual abuse happens in situations where the child trusts or is dependent upon the offender. Some definitions of child sexual abuse include fondling or inappropriate touch, while others focus on specific acts of oral sex or penetration against a person who is too young or unable to consent. Most definitions tend to ignore the social and cultural context of any given episode of sexual abuse. But without taking into account the context, it is very difficult for individuals, communities, or systems to truly define, much less respond appropriately to, the sexual abuse of children.

Who is affected by child sexual abuse?

Child sexual abuse affects people from a wide variety of backgrounds. The statistics show that child sexual abuse crosses boundaries of race, class, culture, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. There is no one kind of community where child sexual abuse happens, no one type of person it happens to. Child sexual abuse affects boys and men, girls and women, and transgendered youth and adults. While victims and offenders are obviously most directly affected, families and communities in which child sexual abuse happens are also deeply impacted when there is no adequate response to the issue.

Approaching the Problem

At Generation Five, we take a variety of approaches to the problem of child sexual abuse. We like to fit our approach to the context we are in rather than go into situations already committed to one particular point of view or plan of action. It is our feeling that the most effective strategy is one that responds to the who, what, where, when, how and why of a situation. Only then can we make the best possible use of the skills, resources, and support available to resolve the problem. We are committed, however, to shifting responses to child sexual abuse from individualized, mental health approaches to approaches that acknowledge child sexual abuse and exploitation as a social and political issue. We collaborate on strategy with existing movements such as domestic violence, family and community violence prevention, youth empowerment, harm reduction, reproductive rights and women's health, child labor, sex-positive sex education, lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender rights, and civil rights. Rather than continuing to isolate child sexual abuse as a lead issue, we work to incorporate child sexual abuse prevention into existing social and economic justice projects.

Child Sexual Abuse as a Mental Health Issue

Most of the political analysis that introduced child sexual abuse as a social issue in the 1970s was simply wiped away when the 1980s claimed it as a mental health issue. The 1980s mental health approach defined child sexual abuse as a problem of specific individuals or families. This approach replaced earlier political analyses of the relationship between sexual trauma and social power with a focus on personal wounds and individual recovery. The financial and cultural exclusivity of much private therapy during this period also ended up framing child sexual abuse as a "white middle-class women's issue," creating obstacles to cross-cultural and cross-class alliance building among survivors. This stereotype enabled backlash movements such as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation to target therapy as a place where troubled white women go to "find problems," stigmatizing mental health support and isolating a range of survivors from services as well as from each other.

A strength of the mental health approach is its recognition that affordable, culturally relevant services can be an important part of responding to and recovering from child sexual abuse. A weakness is that while mental health services can certainly help in dealing with the impact of child sexual abuse, this approach all too often sidesteps the question of prevention, leaving us with a better understanding of the aftermath of abuse without ever clarifying how this knowledge might help us to end it.

Child Sexual Abuse as a Public Health Issue

A Public Health approach situates child sexual abuse in its larger context of individual, family and community health. Public Health emphasizes the value of primary prevention in ending the "epidemic" of violence and supporting families in health. A Public Health approach looks at the long-term, wide reaching effects of child sexual abuse by analyzing: 1) the statistical percentages of people affected by child sexual abuse; 2) the long-term impact of child sexual abuse for some survivors in the form of poor mental and physical health outcomes, including but not limited to harmful or chaotic drug use, harmful sexual relationships and behavior, and chronic illness; 3) the costs to society, measured in mental health issues, job instability, disability, medical costs, legal and judicial costs, etc.; and 4) the ongoing impact of an uninterrupted cycle of violence on public health. Some public health approaches have adopted outreach and services for offenders as a primary prevention strategy.

A strength of the Public Health approach is its focus on primary prevention and education and its emphasis on the health not only of individuals but of families, communities, and society. A weakness is its tendency to reduce complicated health and social issues to a single "cause," framing child sexual abuse statistics in ways that can pathologize survivors rather than investigate the social factors that contribute to or mitigate the severity and duration of negative effects.

Child Sexual Abuse as a Family Violence Issue

Definitions of family violence have grown to encompass a range of abuses - from domestic violence to dating and intimate partner violence to various forms of child abuse and neglect. Instead of looking at only one form of violence in a household, family violence approaches now try to see different forms of abuse as interconnected in complicated ways. Many activists are pushing for systems reform to harmonize conflicting approaches to domestic violence and child abuse, seeking changes that will serve both adults and children in complex family situations. New strategies in family violence prevention are also now supporting the overall health and welfare of families rather than simply intervening in moments of crisis or using threats to punish or leverage change. According to these new approaches, communities can help families to prevent violence and seek effective support by creating public discussions that counter the assumption that "family business" should remain "family business."

A strength of this approach is its insistence that public and community support can help families live free from violence. A weakness is its isolation of family violence from broader contexts of economic or cultural stress and the difficulty many family violence services continue to have in identifying and responding to child sexual abuse specifically.

Child Sexual Abuse as a Human Rights Issue

A human rights approach labels child sexual abuse a violation of children's fundamental right to grow up free from exploitation and abuse. Human rights are often used to describe a citizen's right to demand state accountability, or a citizen's right to live free from undue state persecution. A human rights framework can also be used to hold states accountable for the social and economic conditions that create the sexual exploitation and violation of children. Human rights approaches have primarily been used in the international arena to hold states accountable for violating political and civil rights; this traditional human rights approach has come under criticism for being concerned only with "third world" violations and not with violations that happen in major industrialized countries or violations caused by global economic policies. A human rights approach to child sexual abuse could be strategically effective if used in collaboration with international efforts seeking to hold the state accountable for children's social, economic, and political freedom from sexual exploitation and abuse.

A strength of new human rights approaches is their ability to make political connections between child sexual abuse and child sexual exploitation, global economic policies, transnational child labor, refugee displacement and immigration. A weakness is the difficulty of using human rights approaches inside the U.S. and their strong focus on state accountability. While laws and enforcement policies do need to change, even if the U.S. would recognize its own human rights violations we do not necessarily see the state as the primary means for ending child sexual abuse.

For more information about Generation Five, visit their web site.