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)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“When a child stays needy until he is fifty
oh mother-eye, oh mother-eye, crush me in
the parent is as strong as a telephone pole.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Children are extraordinarily precious members of society; they are exquisitely alert, sensitive, and conscious of their surroundings; and they are extraordinarily vulnerable to maltreatment or emotional abuse by adults who refuse to give them the profound respect and affection to which they are unconditionally entitled.”
—Wisdom of the Elders, quoted in Kids Are Worth It, by Barbara Coloroso, ch. 1 (1994)