Contemporary History of Child Sex Abuse
Child sexual abuse is an umbrella term describing offenses in which an adult engages in sexual activity with a minor or exploits a minor for the purpose of sexual gratification. The American Psychiatric Association states that "children cannot consent to sexual activity with adults," and condemns any such action by an adult as "a criminal and immoral act which never can be considered normal or socially acceptable behavior." Only at the beginning of the 1900s did Western society begin to regard children as fledgling citizens whose "creative and intellectual potential require fostering" rather than "cheap labor." According to The Atlantic "the idea of the 'modern child' was shaped by the same forces that shaped the rest of society: industrialization, urbanization, and consumerism."
Child sex abuse has gained public attention in the past few decades and has become one of the most high-profile crimes. Since the 1970s the sexual abuse of children and child molestation has increasingly been recognized as deeply damaging to children and thus unacceptable for society as a whole. While sexual use of children by adults has been present throughout history, it has only become the object of significant public attention in recent times. The first published work dedicated specifically to child sexual abuse appeared in France in 1857: Medical-Legal Studies of Sexual Assault (Etude Médico-Légale sur les Attentats aux Mœurs), by Auguste Ambroise Tardieu, a noted French pathologist and pioneer of forensic medicine.
Read more about this topic: Catholic Sex Abuse Cases
Famous quotes containing the words contemporary, history, child and/or abuse:
“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)