Becker Blease Co-Authors Policy Article on Child Sex Abuse
The Science of Child Sexual Abuse timed for national Child Abuse Prevention Month
An article entitled The Science of Child Sexual Abuse, co-authored by Kathy Becker Blease, UNH Cooperative Extension Family Education and Policy Specialist, appears in the April 22 issue of the journal Science.
In the Policy Forum article, Becker Blease joins lead author Jennifer Freyd of the University of Oregon and a team of experts in psychiatry, law, political science, and psychology, to summarize scientific findings on the topic and offer recommendations to researchers and policy makers.
The authors cite research on childhood sexual abuse, which shows:
- an association between child sexual abuse and serious mental and
physical health problems, substance abuse, suicide, victimization and
criminality in adulthood.
- most child sex abuse is committed by family members and individuals
close to the child, which increases the likelihood of delayed disclosure
and possible memory failure and increases the potential for negative
reactions by caregivers and lack of intervention.
- 20 percent of women and 5 to 10 percent of men worldwide report incidents
of sex abuse in childhood.
- nearly 90 percent of child sex abuse cases are never reported to
authorities.
- cognitive and neurological mechanisms that may underlie the forgetting of abuse.
To address serious gaps in the research-based understanding of child sex abuse, and problems caused by a knowledge base scattered across many disciplines, the authors call for:
- vigorous interdisciplinary research efforts to determine the prevalence
of child sex abuse and identify its causes and consequences, prevention
and treatment.
- expanding the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, a federally
funded coalition of 54 centers providing community-based treatment
to children and their families.
- creating an Institute of Child Abuse and Interpersonal Violence within the National Institutes of Health.
“A 1996 U.S. Department of Justice Report estimated the annual cost of rape and sexual violence against children at $1.5 billion in medical costs, and $23 million in overall costs,” says Becker Blease. “Expanding our efforts to understand, prevent, and treat child sexual abuse will help us provide better training to health professionals, provide better scientific documentation to policy makers, and raise the levels of both public and private awareness on this important topic.”
Link:
- The Science of Child Sexual Abuse (manuscript version)
