Since its adoption by the United Nations in November 1989, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has become the most universally ratified human rights treaty in history; presently only the United States has not ratified it. The CRC articulates children’s human rights and notably includes freedom from sexual abuse and exploitation. Yet thirty years after the Convention was adopted, child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSA/E) remain serious, persistent, and evolving global issues. This overview both describes the current state of research on child sexual abuse and exploitation and evaluates the CRC’s legacy in terms of State-level responses to CSA/E. Points of agreement and disagreement over what constitutes CSA/E and how widespread it is are explored. Also presented are the contexts in which CSA/E takes place, and factors associated with children’s risk of being sexually abused or exploited. Emerging issues in these areas are the Internet and children’s use of it, as children may now become subject to abuse or exploitation even when physically alone. The second part of the paper addresses the CRC’s influence on States’ domestic legislation and States’ responses to CSA/E more broadly. Gaps in efforts to monitor and report on the CRC’s implementation with respect to its impact on CSA/E are described. The discussion offers guidance for future efforts to research and respond to child sexual abuse and exploitation, and in particular the ongoing need for support to survivors beyond the legal response paradigm.
Journal Articles
Book Chapters
The sexual use of children and vulnerable humans by more powerful humans appears as old as human history. It is only in the last four decades or so that child sexual abuse (CSA) has received attention from the public and researchers. Indeed, until very recently a four-volume Encyclopedia on Interpersonal Violence would not have been possible. Today as this is written a comprehensive treatment of the topic of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) itself would require multiple chapters, if not volumes. This entry is intended to provide an overview of the subject, especially for new professionals and investigators. A comprehensive review of research addressing each topic in this entry is not possible, although key references will be cited for the reader. Important research topics for future investigation will also be identified. A number of advanced topics in CSA will not be addressed here. These include: psychotherapy with victims of CSA (see, e.g., Fitzgerald & Berliner, 2018 and Briere & Scott, 2014), pornography (see, e.g., Anderson, 2017), sexual trafficking (see, e.g., Greenbaum, Yun, & Todres, 2018), and others.
Since the early days of modern interest in child sexual abuse 2 (See Conte and Simon, 2020), child and adult victims’ disclosures of their childhood sexual abuse have been met with skepticism by many. There was a suspicion, especially of young children, that their memoires could not be accurate, that adults who often had positions of authority and power (e.g., teachers, priests, middle class fathers, etc.) could not possibly do what the survivors said was done to them. There was also an appreciation that some styles of interviewing or assessment might lead children to report what did not take place. Many adults did not understand young children’s reports of abuse while others believed that phallic images in children’s art were a disguised disclosure of sexual abuse. In this context of doubt, denial, and faulty theories there was a significant increase in efforts to understand how children could be helped to make disclosures and how adults could have confidence in those disclosures, hence forensic practice became key area in the development of practice and practice knowledge.
The prevention of childhood sexual abuse is of obvious value to society both in terms of limiting suffering of children but also in reducing the costs of social, medical, and legal interventions in the lives of abused children and the adults who influence their lives. The field of prevention has blossomed with ideas for policies and practices to prevent sexual abuse. While encouraging and even hopeful many of these ideas have been implemented without clear data on their power. In this chapter we will critically analyze a number of these current prevention ideas in the hopes of supporting a more focused and evidence based prevention effort.