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November 30, 2004

Media Ignores Decline in Nat'l Child Abuse

Finkelhor, Expert from University of New Hampshire, Discusses Abuse Trends vs. Public Perception

By Kira Goldenberg -- Spectator Staff Writer -- columbiaspectator.com

Child abuse is declining in America, but nobody seems to know it.

“It’s largely been ignored,” David Finkelhor said in a lecture on the topic yesterday at the Columbia University Medical Center. At the lecture, entitled “The Decline in Sexual Abuse, the Rise of the Internet, and Other Child Welfare Developments,” Finkelhor, the director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center and a University of New Hampshire professor, presented data and speculations about the causes of the positive but little-known trend.

Reported cases of sexual abuse of children declined 42 percent from 1991 to 2001, Finkelhor stated, but headlines filled with internet sex offenders and priest pedophilia have overshadowed the good news. Finkelhor cited a 2001 Newsweek special report, “The Darkest Corner of the Internet,” which contained no hard statistics but left readers with the sinister impression that online sexual offenders are running amok.

Meanwhile, the decline in sexual abuse has been accompanied by improvements in other child welfare-related factors: the number of children in poverty, incidences of intimate-partner violence, and the teen birth, teen suicide, and violent crime rates have all declined.

“The confluence of indicators that are related suggest this is real,” Finkelhor said.

Finkelhor pointed to a variety of factors that have contributed to the decline in juvenile sexual abuse. He mentioned that more repeat sex offenders are in prison completing therapy programs. In addition, greater public attention has been focused on the issue in the past decade.

“You can imagine this must have shaken the confidence of would-be child molesters who thought they could get away with such crimes,” Finkelhor said.

Intervention by law enforcement combined with awareness education has helped break the cycle within families that leads victims to grow up to be abusers. Moreover, working in childcare requires more screening than it used to, so potential offenders are less likely to be in contact with youths.

These developments are downplayed by experts because, as Finkelhor dryly noted, “People tend to have Ph.D.’s in terminal pessimism.” There is a prevalent belief that publicizing advances that have already been made will cause a decrease in public interest and that the anti-abuse effort will lose funding in favor of issues that appear more pressing. But Finkelhor noted that, despite the decline, child abuse rates are “still appallingly high.”

The decrease in child abuse is especially surprising given current demographics. Because there is a larger population of children now than in 1992, one might think that more are currently being abused. However, the opposite is true.

“I think that people need to talk a lot more about this,” Finkelhor said.

People are already talking about internet sex crimes against children, which have earned a great deal of media attention over the past few years.

“You don’t need to go too far to know that the internet has made access to childhood pornography much easier,” Finkelhor said, noting that “new technologies almost always provoke large social anxieties that especially focus on influence on the young.”

Although Finkelhor acknowledged that the internet has targeted vulnerable children and created a market and a community for child pornographers, he said that the prevalence of internet-based sex abuse has been exaggerated, adding that in 2000, only 1.5 percent of arrests made due to sex crimes against children involved internet use.

Posted by Nealus at November 30, 2004 02:08 PM

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