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An Epidemiologic Approach to the Study of Child Molestation a
Author(s) -
FINKELHOR DAVID,
LEWIS I. A.
Publication year - 1988
Publication title -
annals of the new york academy of sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.712
H-Index - 248
eISSN - 1749-6632
pISSN - 0077-8923
DOI - 10.1111/j.1749-6632.1988.tb50852.x
Subject(s) - environmental health , medicine , psychology
In the last decade, research on sexual assault has increasingly shifted from an orientation that was clinical and criminologic toward one that was epidemiologic. In concrete terms, studies from prisons, police blotters, and hospital emergency rooms have been replaced by surveys. The clinical and criminologic studies have provided and continue to provide rich findings for the field. But there is increasing recognition that samples from prisons, police, and hospitals do not represent the whole picture. Concern has grown about the large quantity of rape, child sexual abuse, and sexual harassment that goes unreported and undetected. The shift to epidemiologic methods has been matched by a shift to more social psychological concepts. Talk of sociopaths, the criminal personality, pedophilia, sadism, and masochism has given way to talk about rape myths, peer pressure, media exposure, attitudes, and beliefs. The new sense of the scope of the problem has been reflected in a new level of analysis. As much as the field has changed, however, it has not changed uniformly. The epidemiologic shift has been more advanced in the study of victims than of offenders. For example, there has been a large increase in the number of new victims surveys,’-‘ while efforts to study undetected offenders or rape-prone individuals are still fairly new. And within offender research, the shift has been much less developed in the area of child sexual abuse than in the area of rape. A number of techniques have been developed and refined for gaining self-reports from undetected rapists and many analyses treat rape as a behavior of “ordinary” men;>’ but almost no such devices and analyses have been developed for child sexual abusers. In this paper, we will begin to delineate more of the elements of an epidemiologic and social psychological approach to the problem of child molesting. We will try to show that it may be indeed feasible to look at child molesting in this way. In the first section of paper, we will present a study that illustrates how feasible it may be to