Preventing Child Sexual Abuse

Evidence, Policy and Practice

Stephen Smallbone, William L. Marshall, Richard Wortley

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134006588
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Public policy responses to child sexual abuse are dominated by interventions designed to take effect only after offenders have already begun offending, and after children have already been sexually abused. Comparatively little attention has been given to alternative prevention strategies – particularly to those aimed at preventing sexual abuse before it might otherwise occur. Considerable knowledge has been accumulated on the characteristics, modus operandi and persistence of offenders, the characteristics, circumstances and outcomes for victims, and the physical and social settings in which sexual abuse occurs, but little work has been done to systematically apply this knowledge to prevention.This book aims to fulfill this objective through integrating clinical and criminological concepts and knowledge to inform a more comprehensive and effective public policy approach to preventing child sexual abuse. Empirical and theoretical knowledge concerning child sexual abuse is integrated with broader developments in evidence-based crime and child maltreatment prevention, leading to new ideas about understanding and preventing child sexual abuse. This book will be essential reading for anybody with interests in this field.

Chapter 1

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Child sexual abuse: definitions, dimensions, and scope of the problem

Although child sexual abuse (CSA) is generally referred to as a distinct and singular phenomenon, there is a remarkably wide range of circumstances and events that may constitute CSA. Wide variations have been observed in the characteristics, modus operandi and persistence of CSA offenders, in the characteristics, circumstances and outcomes for victims, and in the physical and social settings in which CSA occurs.

These multiple dimensions of CSA, and the wide variations within them, may at first seem to make the task of prevention overwhelmingly difficult, if not impossible. However, it is important to recognise that on virtually none of these dimensions is the incidence of CSA evenly distributed. Not all children are equally at risk of falling victim to sexual abuse, not all victims will be affected in the same way, not all adolescents and adults are equally at risk of becoming offenders, not all offenders are equally at risk of proceeding to a chronic pattern of offending, and not all physical and social environments present the same risk for CSA to occur.

The first step towards developing a comprehensive, evidence-based approach to preventing CSA is therefore to understand the patterns of variation within, and the interactions between, its key empirical dimensions. To the extent these patterns can be reliably identified, the focus of prevention strategies can be narrowed, and prevention resources can accordingly be prioritised. Notwithstanding the limitations of the current knowledge base, the main aim of the present chapter is to specify where, when, how, to whom and by whom CSA occurs. We will turn our attention to the equally important question of why CSA occurs in the next chapter.

We begin here by considering how CSA is defined. We then draw on available evidence to sketch out the key empirical dimensions of CSA, namely the characteristics of offenders, the characteristics of victims and the characteristics of the settings in which CSA occurs. We conclude the present chapter by considering what is known about the scope of the problem.

Defining child sexual abuse

Alongside physical abuse, neglect and negligent treatment, emotional abuse, and the commercial or other exploitation of children, CSA is one of the five types of child maltreatment recognised by the World Health Organisation (WHO 2006). While there may be broad agreement about the social justice principles underlying the need to protect children from all forms of abuse, neglect and exploitation, there is no clear consensus among researchers or practitioners about exactly what constitutes maltreatment, nor among legislators about where to draw the line between illegal and legally tolerated actions involving children. Indeed, in its 1993 review of child maltreatment policy and practice, the US National Research Council (NRC) concluded that despite vigorous debate over the preceding twenty years there had been little progress in the most fundamental task of establishing reliable and valid definitions of child maltreatment, including CSA.

The NRC pointed to problems specifically with: 1) a lack of social consensus about what constitutes child maltreatment; 2) uncertainty about the criteria that should be applied to Defining maltreatment, and particularly whether the characteristics or behaviour of the perpetrator, the outcomes for the child, the circumstances of the maltreatment incident, or some combination of these, should be considered; 3) disagreement about whether definitions should rely on standards of actual or potential harm; and 4) confusion about whether the same standards should apply for scientific, legal and clinical purposes (National Research Council 1993). Although some commentators have argued that an increasing consensus has emerged in the period since the NRC review (see e.g. Herrenkohl 2005), the reliability and validity of maltreatment definitions are yet to be established.

Conceptual ambiguities arise with each term in the phrase child sexual abuse (Haugaard 2000). Researchers concerned with establishing the prevalence of CSA have defined the term child using chronological age thresholds of sixteen (Wurr and Partridge 1996), seventeen (Finkelhor 1979) or eighteen years (Russell 1983; Wyatt 1985). Legal definitions of childhood vary even more widely, with the legal age of consent for heterosexual activity ranging from as low as twelve in some parts of Mexico and the Philippines, to as high as twenty-one in Madagascar. Age of consent is undeclared in Ecuador, North Korea, Oman and Pakistan, and male homosexual activity, regardless of age, remains illegal in some fifty countries worldwide (AIDS Education and Research Trust 2005).

Defining the term sexual is also problematic. While there may be little disagreement that behaviours such as genital stimulation or sexual intercourse constitute sexual behaviour, it is much less clear whether behaviours such as bathing or sleeping with children, kissing, massaging, and so on, might be sexual. Establishing whether the older person in these latter circumstances was sexually motivated is itself problematic, since sexual motivations are difficult to observe and unlikely to be frankly disclosed. Finally, it can be unclear whether the term abuse refers to the intent of the perpetrator or to the experience of the victim, to actual or potential harm to the victim, or even to the violation of social norms.

Early prevalence studies (e.g. Finkelhor 1979; Russell 1983; Wyatt 1985) used broad definitions of CSA that included behaviours such as being invited to do something sexual, being kissed, and nongenital fondling, alongside behaviours such as genital stimulation and sexual intercourse. Haugaard (2000) notes that these early prevalence studies were very influential in drawing public attention to the problem and suggests that the broad research definitions used in these studies may have subsequently influenced clinical and legal definitions. Research using broad definitions tends to produce high prevalence estimates, and to identify large proportions of CSA victims whose abuse experience is at the lower end of the severity continuum (Haugaard 2000) and which is therefore associated with a lower incidence of observable harm (Rind, Tromovitch and Bauserman 1998). A risk in using broad definitions is that the experiences of victims who have suffered more severe abuse may be obscured by more general findings. On the other hand, narrowing the definition of CSA may raise objections that the broader social problem is being minimised.

The World Health Organisation (WHO), together with the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (IPSCAN), defines CSA broadly as:

… the involvement of a child in sexual activity that he or she does not fully comprehend, is unable to give informed consent to, or for which the child is not developmentally prepared, or else that violate the laws or social taboos of society. Children can be sexually abused by adults or other children who are – by virtue of their age or stage of development – in a position of responsibility, trust or power over the victim (WHO 2006: 10).

Like most general definitions of CSA, the WHO definition seeks to describe the general features of the problem rather than to specify its dimensions and to clarify its boundaries. Nor does it resolve any of the definitional problems outlined above. Nevertheless, since it places CSA in an international context the WHO definition suffices as a general conceptual definition for our present purposes.

While it is important to acknowledge the problems associated with Defining CSA, it is equally important not to overstate them. Little disagreement is likely to be found in prototypical cases; rather, it is at the boundaries of the problem where disagreement is likely to be the greatest. Although uncertainty about individual cases will no doubt continue to present serious challenges to those involved in CSA investigations and prosecutions, for example, it makes sense for prevention policy to prioritise those forms of CSA that are known to present the greatest risk of harm for the children concerned, and therefore about which there is least likely to be disagreement. Increasingly, researchers have recognised that the sequelae, and to some extent the causes, of CSA are likely to vary according to temporal factors (age of onset, frequency and duration), severity and the relationship with the perpetrator (Manly 2005), and it is therefore these dimensions that most need to be understood and targeted as priorities for prevention efforts.

Dimensions of child sexual abuse

Our main aim in the present chapter is to sketch out what is presently known about where, when, how, to whom and by whom CSA occurs. While there is an extensive empirical literature on CSA offenders and victims, our emphasis is given initially to the demographic, temporal, spatial and behavioural dimensions of the problem. The various approaches to prevention canvassed later in the book will require consideration of further evidence, which we will examine as required in subsequent chapters.

CSA offender characteristics

Gender

Criminal justice statistics and victimisation surveys consistently identify males as responsible for the vast majority of all sexual offences, including CSA offences. While males are over-represented in virtually all forms of crime, official crime data indicate that sexual offences are almost exclusively the domain of male offenders. By way of illustration, for the year 2004/05 reports to police in Queensland, Australia, indicated that females were involved in 37% of all fraud offences, 31% of theft offences (other than motor vehicle theft), 23% of property offences, 22% of assaults, 12% of robberies, 10% of unlawful entries, and less than 3% of all sexual offences (Queensland Police Service 2006).

Cortoni and Hanson (2005) recently reviewed prevalence studies of female sex offending in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Official data showed that the proportion of female sexual offenders ranged from 0.6% in New Zealand to 8.3% in the US, with an unweighted average of 3.8% across the five countries. The proportion of female sex offenders identified in victimisation surveys ranged from 3.1% in New Zealand to 7.0% in Australia, with an unweighted average of 4.8%.

While prevention of CSA by females may require special attention, available evidence suggests that prevention efforts should concentrate particularly on males as potential, undetected or known offenders. Indeed, there is no other identifying characteristic of CSA offenders that has been as consistently observed as male gender.

Age

Unlike all other forms of crime, the age-crime curve for sexual offences is markedly bimodal (Canadian Center for Justice Statistics 1999). As with nonsexual offences, participation in CSA offending peaks in adolescence and early adulthood. Although reliable prevalence data are notoriously difficult to obtain, international estimates are that adolescents and young adults may be responsible for between 30% and 50% of all CSA offences (Bourke and Donohue 1996; Finkelhor and Dziuba-Leatherman 1994).

However, unlike for nonsexual offences, a second, more prominent peak in involvement with sexual offences occurs in the mid- to late thirties. Some commentators argue that this represents adolescence onset and life-course persistence as the typical trajectory for sexual offenders, including CSA offenders (Abel, Osborn and Twigg 1993). However, rates of observed sexual recidivism among adolescent sexual offenders rarely exceed 10% (Righthand and Welch 2001), and only a minority of adult sexual offenders report that they began their sexual offending as adolescents.

Abel and his colleagues' confidential self-report study (Abel et al. 1987; Abel and Osborn 1992) is commonly cited to support assumptions that early onset is typical for adult CSA offenders. However, a close examination of Abel's data shows that early onset was more characteristic of the victimless paraphilias (e.g. transvestism and fetishism) than of sexual offences themselves. The only subgroup of CSA offenders to report adolescence-onset of deviant sexual interests was nonfamilial offenders against males. For these offenders, who constituted about 20% of the CSA offenders in Abel et al. 's sample (and about 8% of the total sample), the mean self-reported age of onset of their deviant sexual interests was eighteen years. The mean age of onset for nonfamilial offenders (female victims) was twenty-two years, for familial offenders (male victims) twenty-four years, and for familial offenders (female victims) (who constituted 58% of all the child-sex offenders in their sample) twenty-seven years.

In a large-scale correctional survey, the average age of sexual offence convictions for Canadian, British and US adult incest offenders was reported to be forty years, and for adult nonfamilial CSA offenders thirty-seven years (Hanson 2002). However, since CSA offences are often not reported until many years after they have occurred, the age distribution of convicted CSA offenders may be a poor indicator of offending onset. Smallbone and Wortley (2004a) found that the average age at first sexual offence conviction for 362 Australian adult CSA offenders to be thirty-seven years. In the same study, confdential self-reports indicated that the average age at CSA offence onset was thirty-two years. The modal onset-age bracket, accounting for 37% of the sample, was thirty-one to forty years. The age distributions for both the official and self-reported first CSA offence were normal, with very wide ranges: fifteen to seventy-six years for official onset, and ten to sixty-three years for self-reported onset. These data indicate that, for adult CSA offenders, late onset appears to be as common as early onset, but that neither is as common as onset in early middle-age.

Among the implications of these data is that there are two distinct populations of CSA offenders – adolescent and adult offenders – and that different prevention strategies may accordingly be indicated. While there is undoubtedly some overlap between these populations (some adult offenders do begin in adolescence, and some adolescent offenders do proceed to a chronic pattern of sexual offending), available evidence suggests that this overlap is considerably smaller than has traditionally been assumed. It thus seems clear that there are two distinct risk periods for the onset of involvement in CSA offences – adolescence and early middle-age.

Persistence

Much more empirical attention has been given to patterns of CSA offending following initial detection, prosecution and in many cases serving a term of imprisonment, than to offending patterns prior to being arrested for the first time. We simply do not know how many people may commit one or two CSA offences, never get caught, and never repeat it, although presumably this happens. Among those who are caught and are included in research studies, pre-arrest persistence seems to vary systematically according to whether the offending occurs in familial or nonfamilial settings, and according to victim gender. Although Abel et al. 's study has been criticised for its unrepresentative sampling and other methodological problems (see e.g. Marshall and Eccles 1991), it nevertheless shows marked differences in self-reported persistence between familial and nonfamilial CSA offenders. For example, the mean number of victims disclosed by familial offenders in Abel et al. 's study was 1.8, whereas for nonfamilial offenders it was an astonishing seventy-three. The mean number of ‘completed paraphilic acts’ (i.e. the number of discrete incidents reported by the offender that were judged by interviewers to constitute sexual offences) for familial offenders was seventy-seven, and for nonfamilial offenders 128 (Abel and Rouleau 1990). Thus for familial offenders the mean number of incidents per victim was forty-three, and for nonfamilial offenders 1.8.

Abel et al. also found striking differences in victim gender patterns. For nonfamilial offenders, the mean number of girl victims per offender was twelve, while the mean number of boy victims was sixty-one. Male victims outnumbered female victims by 5:1. Notwithstanding the possibility that these were more serious offenders than would generally be encountered in criminal justice settings, the general pattern observed here is consistent with other clinical research findings: familial CSA offenders tend to have only one or two (usually female) victims but tend to offend against them repeatedly before being caught, whereas nonfamilial CSA offenders tend to have more (usually male) victims but tend to offend only once or twice against individual victims.

These high rates of pre-arrest persistence stand in stark contrast to generally low observed sexual recidivism rates among CSA offenders, which, taken together, suggest that being arrested has a major impact on persistence trajectories for CSA offenders. Studies of adolescent sexual offenders have generally reported average sexual recidivism rates ranging from 0% to 20% (Nisbet, Wilson and Smallbone 2004), with findings in the upper range associated with longer follow-up periods (up to ten years), more stringent measures of recidivism (e.g. new charges, rather than new convictions), and residential or custodial samples. In their meta-analysis of sexual offender recidivism studies involving more than 22,000 (mainly adult) sexual offenders from five countries (US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand), Hanson and Bussiere (1998) reported an average sexual recidivism rate for CSA offenders of 12.7% over an average four to five years at risk. Even over the longer term (up to twenty years at risk), average sexual recidivism rates rarely exceed 50% (Hanson 2000; Janus and Meehl 1997). Emerging evidence suggests that the risk of sexual recidivism for CSA offenders declines substantially with age (Hanson 2002).

Hanson and Bussiere's (1998) meta-analysis showed that nonfamilial offenders were more than twice as likely to be reconvicted for new sexual offences (19%) than were familial offenders (8%). Of course, as with nonsexual offences, many sexual offences are never reported to police or child protection authorities, and official recidivism data will therefore under-estimate true recidivism rates. It is unlikely, though, that the extent to which official recidivism data under-estimate true recidivism is uniformly reflected in the discrepancies between official and unofficial victimisation. Rather, as with nonsexual offenders, a small group of persistent offenders may be disproportionately responsible for sexual offence recidivism. For example, Abel e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Child sexual abuse: definitions, dimensions and scope of the problem
• 2 Explaining child sexual abuse: a new integrated theory
• 3 Identifying prevention targets
• 4 Developmental prevention
• 5 Criminal justice interventions
• 6 Treating adult and adolescent offenders
• 7 Victim-focused prevention
• 8 Situational prevention
• 9 Community-focused approaches
• 10 Towards a comprehensive prevention strategy
• References
• Index