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This book offers a timely and detailed exploration and analysis of key contemporary issues and challenges in child sexual abuse, which holds great relevance for scholarly, legal, policy, professional and clinical audiences worldwide. The book draws together the best current evidence about the nature, aetiology, contexts, and sequelae of child sexual abuse. It explores the optimal definition of child sexual abuse, considers sexual abuse in history, and explores new theoretical understandings of children’s rights and other key theories including public health and the Capabilities Approach, and their relevance to child sexual abuse prevention and responses. It examines a selection of the most pressing legal, theoretical, policy and practical challenges in child sexual abuse in the modern world, in developed and developing economies, including institutional child sexual abuse, female genital cutting, child marriage, the use of technology for sexual abuse, and the ethical responsibility and legal liability of major state and religious organisations, and individuals. It examines recent landmark legal and policy developments in all of these areas, drawing in particular on extensive developments from Australia in the wake of its Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It also considers the best evidence about promising strategies and future promising directions in enhancing effective prevention, intervention and responses to child sexual abuse.

Public health law developed over centuries in a fashion distinct from historic child protection law. Public health law, with its focus on the health and safety of whole populations and lesser attention to individual rights and liberties, has been a core element in the development and practice of modern public health. Public health law reflects public health itself through its focus on science and evidence-based policies, support for the utilization of both population-based intervention and prevention, but also its endorsement of limited use of targeted campaigns and clinical interventions directed at specifically identified individuals that have taken place from the local to a global scale. Individual rights have become more prominent in many countries over the past few centuries, for example during the advent of HIV. Nevertheless, more than many other governmental activities, public health policy and practice are science-based and the legitimacy and power of public health laws rest primarily on their support by science. Along with a foundation of science, public health practitioners have inherited and practiced the medical ethos of reviewing their regulations and activities to determine effects, identify possible errors, and embed accountability for all of their efforts through continuing self-examination, and utilization of recent biological, chemical, environmental and behavioral research. Finally, law itself is not only a means of articulating public health powers and limitations, but the effects of laws can be an important variable to research and consider when efforts are made to advance the public’s health. A related question is the extent to which the training of lawyers enhances or detracts from their ability to advance public health by understanding and endorsing public health science versus attacking its science by using legal tactics.

This chapter first discusses a range of contemporary cultural challenges regarding child sexual abuse, some of which have existed for thousands of years, and some of which are of more recent origin. It discusses child marriage, and female genital mutilation/cutting, covering their nature and consequences. It poses the question of whether they constitute species of child sexual abuse, and whether or not they do, refers to concepts of rights to explain why action can legitimately be taken to end these practices. Then, it considers the more recent phenomenon of child sex tourism. For these three cultural problems, it considers recent progress and responses, which have occurred through legal and regulatory responses, community involvement, the generation of new social norms, and multinational cooperation. The second part of this chapter considers recent and emerging technological challenges: online sexual abuse and child pornography; sexting and coercive online practices; and robotics. It considers recent progress and responses to these phenomena, noting new criminal prohibitions, and prevention considerations. It then considers the need to develop a new ethic of technology to respond to the new digital epoch, incorporating a consideration of the responsibilities of individuals, of social systems such as schools, and corporate responsibility and regulation. Key messages of this chapter are that some cultural challenges such as FGM/C have recently witnessed seismic reform, influenced by new conceptions of rights, legal protections, the involvement of women and communities, and scientific understanding. Others, however, such as child marriage, have not yet experienced significant change, and require ongoing multidimensional efforts responding to root causes. Technological challenges are substantial and growing, and legal regulation of individuals and corporations is necessary but not sufficient. There is a need for a public health approach to have a greater focus on prevention, requiring education from early childhood to enhance gender equality, skills and attitudes, and develop a new ethic of technology.

This chapter discusses law’s role in preventing, detecting and responding to child sexual abuse. It first notes the historical absence of children’s legal rights and protections, and comments on the gradual social and legal change that has occurred. It identifies how political theory and public health theory translate into social norms, legal entitlements and protections, noting the recognition of children’s rights by international law. Then, it focuses on the nature of national legal systems, conceiving domestic law as a social system required to protect individuals’ personal security, and within this, performing the key role of recognising children’s rights. It identifies law’s role in the prevention, detection and response to child sexual abuse, and places this role in the context of the major sources of law: legislation, common law and international law. It then highlights key general principles from criminal law, civil law, and child protection law relevant to the context of child sexual abuse. It explores public health law and its range of mechanisms that are capable of preventing, detecting and responding to sexual abuse. Finally, it covers regulatory theory, an important consideration in any regulatory effort, and provides insights into institutional regulation; this is particularly relevant for institutional sexual abuse prevention and response. The key message of this chapter is that every society’s legal system has a broad range of tools to create rights, obligations and remedies, and to set social norms, regarding child sexual abuse. Moreover, consistent with political theory and public health theory, every legitimate society has a responsibility to use these tools to protect its vulnerable citizens, including children, and to take reasonable actions to prevent, identify and respond to child sexual abuse.

This chapter first focuses on major challenges confronting child and youth-serving organisations and high-risk settings. It then discusses the nature, key findings and major recommendations of Australia’s Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, a landmark public inquiry into institutional sexual abuse, including a special focus on the Roman Catholic Church. The chapter then focuses on several recent examples of progress in responses to major problems presented by child sexual abuse in institutional and non-institutional settings. Developments from Australia in particular, but also from other countries, will show how new public health law responses, including through civil law, and with various emphases on primary prevention and secondary prevention, can create frameworks for enhanced prevention, identification, and response to cases of child sexual abuse. Some of these responses, such as redress schemes, reportable conduct schemes and child safe standards legislation, have specific application to institutional settings. Other responses, such as the abolition of statutes of limitation for civil claims for injuries caused by sexual abuse, and other kinds of legislative reporting duties, have broader application across society, as they apply to sexual abuse in all settings, whether within institutions, families, private settings, or other community settings. These responses are of broad application regarding prevention of child sexual abuse, early identification of child sexual offending, and ensuring appropriate responses once it is known or suspected. They are particularly relevant when dealing with high risk institutional settings and prolific individual offenders, both of which present especially urgent examples of the need for an appropriate societal approach to child sexual abuse informed by public health and social justice.

This chapter sets out the context of child sexual abuse and marks out several points of departure from which the rest of the book proceeds. It first defines the concept of child sexual abuse. Then, it reviews the best literature on the prevalence of child sexual abuse both generally, and in specific contexts, around the world. It reviews other important epidemiological features, referring to evidence about gender, age of onset, the relationship between those who inflict abuse and the child, frequency of offending, factors influencing offending, and theories of offending. It notes the common health and behavioural consequences of child sexual abuse. Significantly, it then reviews literature on the common non-disclosure of child sexual abuse by both girls and boys: a critical feature of this context. The chapter than shows that the gravity of child sexual abuse should be and is recognised in international policy and in most social norms. An appropriately nuanced approach is then urged, in recognition of a spectrum of cases that demand appropriately differentiated responses. Finally, the chapter explains that the book also proceeds on the basis that in any civilised society, individuals, institutions and broader social systems and nation states have a deep ethically-based duty to prevent and identify child sexual abuse, and to respond appropriately to it after it occurs. These ethical duties are consistent with bodies of political and public health theory, the Capabilities Approach, and human dignity informing the book’s entire conceptual approach.