6 - Child Sexual Abuse

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the prevalence, incidence, and effects of child sexual abuse and various professional interventions related to it, such as child protection investigation and mental-health assessment, treatment, and prevention. Various research findings on the subject indicate that victims are fairly evenly distributed across the age span of childhood—that is, preschoolers, latency-aged children, and adolescents. However, the legal definitions of the upper age limit may differ by state and by statutes such as statutory rape, incest, and criminal sexual conduct statutes. The maximum age used in research for girls is generally 16 or 18, but some researchers have used a maximum age of 12 for boys. A sex offender may be a male or a female, although the vast majority are males, between 85 and 99% depending upon the study. As awareness of sexual abuse grows, so does the proportion of female offenders identified. Generally, offenders are adults or adolescents. The term “prevalence” is used to refer to the proportion of a designated population that has a particular problem or characteristic. In the case of sexual abuse, prevalence refers to the number of people who were sexually abused during childhood.