Historical Perspectives on Child Sexual Abuse, Part 1

Abstract

This article reviews histories of child sexual abuse in Australia. While it is national in its focus, the historical problems, methods, and approaches explored here resonate globally, especially in the Anglosphere. Given the transnational dimensions of sex and gender politics, child welfare and protection, and the development of common law, any local historiographic survey is best located within the international context. This article argues that defining and interpreting sex with children is a significant problem in the historical literature. The cleavage between constructions of innocence and paradigms of abuse remains prominent in contemporary scholarship although assimilating these schools of thought is neither feasible nor fruitful. The first part of this article explores the feminist rediscovery of child sexual abuse in the late twentieth century, considering the extent to which the problem had been earlier erased from the public domain. Paying particular attention to law and socio-legal histories, it investigates definitional problems around children and crime, and examines how the criminal justice system and media have been used to recover histories of abuse.

The ‘Great Decarceration’: Historical Trends and Future Possibilities

“…Recent studies of historical institutional abuse (Bingham et al . 2016) indicate that everyday emotional, physical, and sexual violence – between some staff and children, as well as between children – flourished in such settings, and still do (Smaal 2013). In other words, the protective effects offered by these institutions must be offset by their harmful effects.…”

Reviewing the Focus: A Summary and Critique of Child-Focused Sexual Abuse Prevention

“…Understanding current perspectives and approaches to reducing CSA requires some consideration of CSA prevention’s history. It has been argued that Freud’s renunciation of his radical seduction theory, which directly implicated CSA in adult emotional ill-health, played an early role in shaping society’s approaches to prevention and paved the way for the denial of CSA, and its harmfulness, that characterized a significant part of the 20th century (Masson, 1992; Olafson, Corwin, & Summit, 1993; Smaal, 2013). Possibly in response to criticism Freud received from colleagues and mentors, Freud’s seduction theory, with its extrapsychic etiology, morphed into the intrapsychic Oedipus complex.…”

“…Possibly in response to criticism Freud received from colleagues and mentors, Freud’s seduction theory, with its extrapsychic etiology, morphed into the intrapsychic Oedipus complex. Some feminist thinkers trace society’s denial of victims’ experience of sexual abuse to the Oedipus complex, which they claim reformulated CSA into a figment of the victim’s imagination, resulting in its suppression as a focus of research or prevention efforts for most of the 20th century (Masson, 1992; Russell, 1999; Smaal, 2013). However, Angelides (2004a) stresses that Freud repudiated not the seduction theory in its entirety but the sole etiological significance of sexual abuse in adult mental health.…”

“…Likewise, Jenkins (2004) highlights the cyclical nature of CSA, with public and political concern peaking in 1915, 1935, and the mid-1970s, continuing to the present day. Smaal (2013) suggests that professionals and practitioners were contemplating and rethinking the problem between 1910 and 1970 rather than ignoring it.…”

“…Academic interest in the field flourished, and throughout the 1980s and 1990s, CSA research burgeoned in the United States (Conte, 1994; Smaal, 2013), with several journals devoted to it (e.g., Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment and the Journal of Child Sexual Abuse founded in 1988 and 1992, respectively). Mandatory reporting was introduced in the United States and government funding increased substantially.…”