Society seems to have a problem dealing with any sexual abuse case in which the offender is not completely bad or the victim is not completely "good." Child victims who, for example, simply behave like human beings and respond to the attention and affection of offenders by voluntarily and repeatedly returning to the offender's home are troubling. It confuses us to see the victims in child pornography giggling or laughing. At professional conferences on child sexual abuse, child prostitution is almost never discussed. It is the form of sexual victimization of children most unlike the stereotype of the innocent girl victim. Child prostitutes, by definition, participate in and often initiate their victimization. Furthermore, child prostitutes and the participants in child sex rings are frequently boys. One therapist recently told me that a researcher's data on child molestation were misleading because many of the child victims in question were child prostitutes. This implies that child prostitutes are not "real" child victims. In a survey by the Los Angeles Times, only 37 percent of those responding thought that child prostitution constituted child sexual abuse (Timnik, 1985). Whether or not it seems fair, when adults and children have sex, the child is always the victim.
Intrafamilial Child Sexual Abuse
During the 1970s, primarily as a result of the women's movement, society began to learn more about the sexual victimization of children. We began to realize that most children are sexually molested by someone they know who is usually a relative—a father, step-father, uncle, grandfather, older brother, or even a female relative. Some mitigate the difficulty of accepting this by adopting the view that only members of socio-economic groups other than their's engage in such behavior.
It quickly became apparent that warnings about not taking gifts from strangers were not good enough to prevent child sexual abuse. Consequently, we began to develop prevention programs based on more complex concepts, such as good touching and bad touching, the "yucky" feeling, and the child's right to say no. These are not the kinds of things you can easily and effectively communicate in fifty minutes to hundreds of kids packed into a school auditorium. These are very difficult issues, and programs must be carefully developed and evaluated.
In the late 1970s child sexual abuse became almost synonymous with incest, and incest meant father-daughter sexual relations. Therefore, the focus of child sexual abuse intervention became father-daughter incest. Even today, the vast majority of training materials, articles, and books on this topic refer to child sexual abuse only in terms of intrafamilial father-daughter incest.
Incest is, in fact, sexual relations between individuals of any age too closely related to marry. It need not necessarily involve an adult and a child, and it goes beyond child sexual abuse. But more important, child sexual abuse goes beyond father-daughter incest. Intrafamilial incest between an adult and child may be the most common form of child sexual abuse, but it is not the only form.
The progress of the 1970s in recognizing that child sexual abuse was not simply a result of "stranger danger" was an important breakthrough in dealing with society's denial. The battle, however, is not over. The persistent voice of society luring us back to the more simple concept of "stranger danger" may never go away. It is the voice of denial.
Return to "Stranger Danger"
In the early 1980s the issue of missing children rose to prominence and was focused primarily on the stranger abduction of little children. Runaways, throwaways, noncustodial abductions, nonfamily abductions of teenagers—all major problems within the missing children's issue—were almost forgotten. People no longer wanted to hear about good touching and bad touching and the child's right to say no.
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