BY SILENCE BETRAYED
John Crewdson
Boston: Little Brown, 1988
256 pp., $17.95
THE SECRET TRAUMA
Diana E.H. Russell
New York: Basic Books, 1986
411 pp., $24.95
As recently as a decade ago, the director of a division of the National Institutes of Health refused to review grant proposals outlining studies on the incidence, outcome, and treatment of childhood physical abuse. The practice was considered to be so infrequent that funding such projects would be a waste of the taxpayers' money. Several dissenters to this official line actually resigned in protest and on their own, with their own private funds, eventually succeeded in bringing this national problem to the attention of the public. Once the lid came off the subject of physical abuse, investigations of childhood incest and sexual abuse followed shortly, spurred more recently by national media attention to cases of mass sexual abuse of children in Jordan, Minnesota and Manhattan Beach, California. Television audiences in 1984 witnessed the first dramatization of father-daughter incest in a play called Amelia.
By Silence Betrayed and The Secret Trauma are about the sexual abuse of children. The first, by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Crewdson, is the culmination of three years of reporting and research. It is a compelling and beautifully written account of the social and emotional ramifications surrounding the victims, the victimizers, and their families and communities. Diana Russell's book is a comprehensive report on her famous San Francisco study of a normative cross section of 930 women, all of whom were interviewed by a trained team of sociologists. Whereas Russell's account focuses entirely on women and is mainly concerned with incestuous sexual abuse, Crewdson's book is much more socially oriented, wider-ranging, and includes evidence on the prevalence of sexual abuse by nonrelatives and of male children. Each book is essential reading for very different reasons: Crewdson's book for the sheer scope of coverage of the problem and the stunning clarity of his style; Russell's volume for the definitive and detailed reporting of her data. Whereas Crewdson's book nearly demands nonstop reading, Russell's book is much harder to chew and is perhaps most palatable for readers who sample relevant chapters.
Both volumes establish the profiles of the sexually abused and the abuser. As Crewdson adopts Russell's definitions of serious and nonserious sexual abuse, it is easier to compare their findings. Serious sexual abuse includes all forms of exploitive sexual conduct, ranging form attempted petting (touching of breasts, genitals, etc.) to rape. This definition excludes wanted sex play by peers (including relatives), unwanted petting during dating in the fourteen-seventeen-year range, and noncontact sexual advances such as exhibitionism and verbal propositions. Using these criteria, the most commonly abused child is female and, according to Russell's study, the incidence of serious familial and nonfamilial sexual abuse of girls under eighteen years was an alarming 38 percent (28 percent for girls under fourteen). Crewdson's report puts the figure for those under eighteen somewhat lower, at about 31 percent. In a recent study of my own in a clinical
...
Read Full Article
|
