Child Sexual Abuse: Its Scope and Our Failure

Rebecca Bolen's authoritative book, 'Child Sexual Abuse: Its Scope and Our Failure', clearly defines the scope of child sexual abuse and addresses society's ability to respond to the problem. Society's response to child sexual abuse is failing because the policies, programs, and statutes designed to assess and identify abuse are grounded in historical and myth-bound theoretical child sexual abuse literature rather than in the empirical knowledge base. This comprehensive text on child sexual abuse covers: The historical conceptualization of child sexual abuse, starting with Freud; a review of the empirical literature on the incidence and prevalence of child sexual abuse; the professional response to child sexual abuse; the most sophisticated model of risk of child sexual abuse done to date; two new models of understanding reactions to nonoffending guardians; the pervasiveness of the threat of extrafamilial abuse.