Dealing with sexual abuse is painful, especially when it involves a child you care about.

And when it happens in church families, we all bear the pain and need help in knowing how to respond. We ask, should we talk about this or keep it secret to protect those involved? When it becomes known, what people or programs are available to assist? When is therapy needed, and how can the right counselor be found? Does healing really occur, and if so, when and how can we expect it? How do we handle the theological questions the crisis raises? And what should our church be doing?

Dr. Tim Kearney has seen and felt such pain. In this warm and hopeful book he shows how the healing touch of God can come, frequently through God's people in the Christian community.

Here is help with
-- recognizing the symptoms
-- how to handle disclosure
-- understanding the systems that respond to abuse
-- the "Why did God let this happen?" question
-- how a church can become abuse-aware
-- caring for caregivers as well as for the child

This book addresses the development of our understanding of the abuse and neglect in the lives of children with disabilities. Disabilities in childhood uniquely dispose children for their abuse and neglect. Additionally, abuse and neglect dispose children for disabilities. The care and education of children with disabilities requires unique knowledge and skills and so does the consideration of their abuse and neglect. This book is based on data generated from an analysis of cases involving the abuse and neglect of children with disabilities as well as on an analysis of the data based literature in this area. Readers are provided with analysis and reflection exercises throughout the text so that they may analyze and reflect on their own awareness of the abuse and neglect of children with disabilities. Each chapter also contains a set of implications for research and practice. The final chapter focuses directly on prevention. Caregivers and professionals across disciplines will develop a new understanding of their roles in universal, secondary, and tertiary level prevention that is targeted, focused, data-based, and designed to prevent the abuse and neglect of children with disabilities in the first place.

Literature in the child abuse and child protection arena has tended to adopt either a practice or legal perspective. Drawing on their expertise as researchers and leaders in their field, Julia Davison and Antonia Bifulco offer a comprehensive and cohesive book on child abuse and child protection, drawing on both criminological and psychological perspectives on all forms of child maltreatment and child protection practice together with impacts on the victims. This book considers a range of areas, from definitions of child abuse and discussions of its prevalence, to an examination of the experiences of children in care, to international perspectives on children within the criminal justice system, to the emergence of online child abuse and the increasing awareness of historical abuse. Each chapter draws together key elements in the field, including prevalence and definition, different disciplinary approaches; different practice challenges; international impacts; and technological issues. Brief case studies throughout the book reflect the voice or experience of the child, ensuring that the focus remains on the child at the centre of the abuse. Balancing coverage of theory and research and considering implications for practice and policy, this book will appeal to a range of disciplines, including criminology, psychology, psychiatry, social work and law.

Juvenile homicide and fatal maltreatment remain serious and pervasive problems in the developed world and especially in the United States, where in 2005 some 1,500 children died from neglect and physical abuse. Alarming statistics such as this, as well as an upsurge in the media attention paid to all things forensic, underscore the pressing need for the utmost rigor in the scientific investigation of child abuse cases. This well timed volume is a response to the climate of public and press interest in such inquiries, where the forensic aspects of the casework generate an enormous amount of attention. The contributions cover a wide range of topics and explore many of the finer details of investigations into juvenile fatalities suspected of being abuse-related. The chapters reflect both the multi-disciplinary nature of such investigations, and also the need for law enforcement professionals to take a rounded, holistic approach to the casework involved. The motivational factors that lead many professionals enter this arena of investigation are, of course, personal and individual. However, at the core of their commitment and their work is a shared need for justice, plain and simple. Victim advocacy and protecting the rights of children, both living and deceased, remains a key impetus for those professionals who specialize in child abuse research. At the heart of this book is the aim of providing both a vital resource for investigators, and a purposeful voice for the young victims of abuse, unable as they are to stand up and speak for themselves.

Although the subject of children's rights and the sociology of childhood and child sexual abuse has been the subject of extensive scholarly deliberation and commentary, there has been very little consideration of the way networks and digital information create a trust deficit, which consequently implicates all non-State actors and civil society. There is a need to understand the dynamics of the multi-stakeholder Internet governance model and the challenges Web 2.0 technologies pose for child protection policy-making. This book fills the lacuna. "Online Child Safety: Law, Technology and Governance "directs its focus on the governance challenges raised by the problems of ascertaining the integrity, authenticity and reliability of information flows and network infrastructures for our attitudes towards risks facing children and strategies for enhancing their safety in the online environment. It also seeks to understand the nature of convergence and articulates the significance of emerging regulatory trends in the way compliance with child safety norms are defined, communicated and enforced.

A disturbing look at the suffering of one small orphaned, Irish boy and the abuse he endured between 1939-1948, when the Irish legal system and the church had gone mad with regard to the care of children.

'A Life Hidden from View' is a candid look at my life through my eyes. I had a somewhat unconventional childhood, living a very secluded, mostly in solitude, life. Going to school wasn't without its dramas. Once the other children found out I was illegitimate, the bullying started. At senior school, circumstances led to me being sexually abused. When I left school, life improved for a while. I grew up into a very independent young woman. Supporting myself and doing really well at work. I do have a somewhat quirky outlook on life and my sense of humour reflects this, as you will see sprinkled throughout the pages. My feelings of isolation, not loneliness, has not stopped me doing what I want to do. I have travelled alone to various holiday destinations and enjoyed them all. I have enjoyed pastimes of dancing and being around horses for most of my adult life. I am currently researching to find my dad. Although I say I am mostly alone, I'm not really. I do tend to attract the supernatural and have seen, and been in the presence of, what some people may call ghosts. I don't quite view them like that. In my later years at work I was bullied, to the extent that I took early retirement to get away from it. Being bullied, abused and neglected for most of my life has resulted in me having long-lasting health issues. I want my book to be a help guide to any of my readers who may find themselves in similar situations. It is important that you tell someone, get the help you need and deal with it, so you can move on with your life. I hope my book helps.

Violence Against Children adopts in its title the exhortation of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, "Making Human Rights Real," which also represents the leitmotif of the book. It examines the prevalence of violence against children in Africa, the Asia Pacific Region, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and in the United States, and explores major ways of its prevention. Making human rights real engenders the challenge of helping all children to be free from violence and to lead a life replete with genuine nurture and the elimination of all violence. Only in this manner will the goal of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development -target 16.2-be achieved and the child as a rights-bearing individual realized in her/his fullness. The specially commissioned chapters that make up the volume have been written by renowned scholars, researchers and advocates. They coalesce to provide an overview of the challenges facing children exposed to violence worldwide, and they advance discussions of the measures which are available and necessary for the prevention of violence against children. The book is intended for policy-makers, researchers and students of the social sciences and human rights who are interested in ending all the widespread maltreatment of children in our societies and our time.

This book presents and illustrates the perspectives and roles of six disciplines on a multidisciplinary child-protection team. It is intended to be used as part of the academic preparation for professionals from the respective disciplines who are interested in working in the field of child abuse and neglect. It includes educational, legal, nursing, medical, psychological, and social work perspectives and principles, and practice for team development.

Chapter 1 discusses the history of multidisciplinary teams in child welfare services. Chapter 2 focuses on the organization and structure of child abuse and neglect services and the functions of the social worker within this service system. Chapter 3 presents the medical aspects of the multidisciplinary team approach in diagnosing, discussing, evaluating, and analyzing cases. Chapter 4 delineates the role of professional psychology in the prevention, assessment, and treatment of child abuse and neglect cases. Chapter 5 begins with an explanation of the importance of the law, which provides remedy by punishing the abuser or placing the child in a safe and nurturing home. Chapter 6 provides knowledge and understanding of the legal status of educators as related to child abuse and neglect. In Chapter 7, the use of the nursing process in practice with abusive and neglectful families is outlined. Particular attention is paid to the identification of assessment warning signs that can indicate potential or actual abuse. Chapter 8 outlines strategies for team development, emphasizing team process, which includes communication, decision making, and conflict management. Emphasis is placed on clarifying roles, structure, and format of various types of teams.

Child sexual abuse has become a prevalent topic of study and discussion in the fields of Child Psychology, Pediatrics, Law Enforcement, and Social Work. But even with the widespread knowledge of identifiable behavior in its victims and abusers, society's response to child sexual abuse is failing profoundly. Rebecca Bolen's authoritative book, Child Sexual Abuse: Its Scope and Our Failure, clearly defines the scope of child sexual abuse and addresses society's ability to respond to the problem. It is her thesis that society's response to child sexual abuse is failing because the policies, programs, and statutes designed to assess and identify abuse are grounded in historical and myth-bound theoretical child sexual abuse literature rather than in the empirical knowledge base. This comprehensive text on child sexual abuse covers: The historical conceptualization of child sexual abuse, starting with Freud. A review of the empirical literature on the incidence and prevalence of child sexual abuse. The professional response to child sexual abuse. The most sophisticated model of risk of child sexual abuse done to date. Two new models of understanding reactions by nonoffending guardians. The pervasiveness of the threat of extrafamilial abuse. GBP/LISTGBP This text is divided into three main areas of discussion: Sociohistorical Context, Scope of the Problem, and Aftermath. This comprehensive review can be used not only as a text, but also as a primary reference for professionals in government, law enforcement, medical, mental health, and any agency that works with child sexual abuse offenders and victims.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER When a fancy car pulls up outside six-year-old Marie's home in Oldham, in 1959, she is told she is going on holiday... In fact, she is taken to live in a convent, overseen by a cruel and sadistic nun. There, a horrific ritual of physical, sexual and mental abuse begins. Marie feels unable to share details of her suffering with anyone. Until years later, when a police investigation is launched, and she realises that the time has finally come to tell the truth...

This collection of essays addresses twentieth-century historical and contemporary issues regarding children who are considered to be at risk.

Psychosis and the Traumatised Self explores what it is like to experience psychosis for individuals with histories of childhood physical and sexual abuse. The book additionally explores how meaning expressed in psychosis might originate from the effects of abuse, but also long-term life difficulties, motivations, memories, social history, and struggles to narrate and understand. One chapter focuses on refugees who suffered trauma as adults and later became psychotic. Another chapter examines how trauma leads to the destruction of certainty and trust, thereby opening a pathway to persecutory ideas. Drawing on a developmental model of trauma, it is proposed that dissociated parts of the self that developed during childhood contribute to psychosis in adults when undergoing difficulties and stress. Presented with case illustrations, the book will be useful for those who work in the area of psychosis and abuse to understand the experiences of individuals, and how we might develop appropriate therapy and care.

Dynamic Psychotherapy with Adult Survivors: Living Past Neglect by Lori Bennett examines the aftereffects of emotional neglect in order to help clinicians to better serve survivors. Bennett makes an important contribution by expanding upon the definition of neglect to include emotional neglect while fostering a more profound understanding of the impact of childhood neglect upon adult survivors. The book compiles former clients stories of recovery in order to illustrate and explore effective therapy and treatment techniques that will aid in the training of the clinicians who serve survivors of neglect. How do young adults climb out of their histories of neglect? How can they hope to feel loved if they never experienced the love they needed in their families of origin? How do they combat the damage to trust? How do they learn to stop the self-blame over circumstances, to move beyond the past, and to embrace a new future? These questions are answered in Dynamic Psychotherapy with Adult Survivors.

This book offers an analysis of the existing normative framework regulating the right to reparation for child victims of armed conflict. The study questions whether the current framework is sufficiently developed to provide child victims with adequate, effective and prompt reparations; furthermore it presents and critically assesses the judicial and non-judicial mechanisms in place as well as the reparations awarded and implemented so far at the international and regional level.The research stems from the need to fill a gap in the current literature on transitional justice, in particular on the right to reparation. Even though reparations are well-established legal measures in several domestic judicial systems all over the world, in transitional periods reparations are not just a means to redress the harm suffered by the victims of wrongful acts, but they also seek to contribute to the reconstitution or the constitution of a new political community in the aftermath of an armed conflict. The overview of the relevant cases and materials provided in this book helps paving the way for reparations that are effective, adequate, prompt, and in line with the international standards set forth by the CRC and other instruments. This book ultimately strives to highlight the shortcomings of the existing mechanisms and it points out the main issues that need to be improved and/or overcome in pursuance of child victims' redress.

During psychoanalysis as a young adult, the author was treated by an analyst who distorted, misunderstood, and misinterpreted painful childhood events. In a successful second analysis, Dr. Schave was able to uncover forgotten memories of sexual abuse, buried from her conscious awareness for over 35 years. The author's emotional contact with the realities of her traumatic past led to a healing process, and as Dr. Schave understood and overcame her childhood experiences, she was better able to treat other survivors of sexual abuse. Schave's story is vitally important to other survivors because it is a first person account that details the recovery process. In a compelling manner, she relates what she can remember of her abuse and more importantly, how she came to realize she was not a damaged person. Incest is taboo in our culture, making it a difficult subject to discuss. For this and other reasons, not much is known about how to treat survivors. With her hard-won personal and professional insights, Dr. Schave explores various treatment options, focusing on the crucial importance of sensitivity, honesty, and equal partnership between therapist and patient. She leads survivors of sexual abuse through phases of therapy that include the toleration of feelings, reduction of stress, uncovering forgotten memories, confrontation, and integrating the trauma. This is a unique and hopeful book. abuse is important for its first-person account

In the 1980s, a series of child sex abuse cases rocked the United States. The most famous case was the 1984 McMartin preschool case, but there were a number of others as well. By the latter part of the decade, the assumption was widespread that child sex abuse had become a serious problem in America. Yet within a few years, the concern about it died down considerably. The failure to convict anyone in the McMartin case and a widely publicized appellate decision in New Jersey that freed an accused molester had turned the dominant narrative on its head. In the early 1990s, a new narrative with remarkable staying power emerged: the child sex abuse cases were symptomatic of a 'moral panic' that had produced a witch hunt. A central claim in this new witch hunt narrative was that the children who testified were not reliable and easily swayed by prosecutorial suggestion. In time, the notion that child sex abuse was a product of sensationalized over-reporting and far less endemic than originally thought became the new common sense. But did the new witch hunt narrative accurately represent reality? As Ross Cheit demonstrates in his exhaustive account of child sex abuse cases in the past two and a half decades, purveyors of the witch hunt narrative never did the hard work of examining court records in the many cases that reached the courts throughout the nation. Instead, they treated a couple of cases as representative and concluded that the issue was blown far out of proportion. Drawing on years of research into cases in a number of states, Cheit shows that the issue had not been blown out of proportion at all. In fact, child sex abuse convictions were regular occurrences, and the crime occurred far more frequently than conventional wisdom would have us believe. Cheit's aim is not to simply prove the narrative wrong, however. He also shows how a narrative based on empirically thin evidence became a theory with real social force, and how that theory stood at odds with a far more grim reality. The belief that the charge of child sex abuse was typically a hoax also left us unprepared to deal with the far greater scandal of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church, which, incidentally, has served to substantiate Cheit's thesis about the pervasiveness of the problem. In sum, The Witch-Hunt Narrative is a magisterial and empirically powerful account of the social dynamics that led to the denial of widespread human tragedy.

Winner of the Christine M. Alder Book Prize in 2015 from the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology Historical abuse of children is a worldwide phenomenon. This book assesses the enablers of abuse and the reasons it took so long for officials to respond. It analyzes redress for institutional abuse in two countries, Canada and Australia, using first-hand accounts of survivors' experiences.

A holistic sociological approach that explores why offenders sexually abuse children The sexual abuse of children is one of the most morally unsettling and emotionally inflammatory issues in American society today. It has been estimated that roughly one out of every four girls and one in ten boys experience some form of unwanted sexual attention either inside or outside the family before they reach adulthood. How should society deal with the sexual victimization of children? Should known offenders be released back into our communities? If so, where, and with what rights, should they be allowed to live? In Unspeakable Acts, Douglas W. Pryor argues that much of this debate, designed to deal with abusers after they have offended, ignores the important issue of why men cross these forbidden sexual boundaries to molest children in the first place and how the behavior can possibly be prevented before it starts. Incorporating in-depth interviews with more than thirty convicted child molesters, Pryor explores how men become involved with breaking sexual boundaries with children. He looks at how their lives prior to offending contributed to and led up to what they did, the ways that initial interest in sex with children began, the tactics offenders employed to molest their victims over time, how they felt about and reacted to their behavior between offending episodes, and how they were ultimately able to stop. The author expands our understanding of this often reviled, little understood group, leaving us with the uneasy conclusion that the moral wall separating us from what is defined as extreme, sick behavior is not as opaque as we would like to believe.

This book presents the outcomes of a field action project at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). Project Chunauti (English translation: Project Challenge) focused on a group of intellectually disabled, orphan children who were survivors of abuse, exploitation and neglect, and describes their journey toward empowerment. It offers a vision and a reproducible, adaptable model for rehabilitation that can foster the social re-integration of intellectually disabled orphans at institutions. As the implementation of laws is especially important for vulnerable groups, the book also outlines a socio-legal approach that not only impacts the children directly, but can also bring about policy level reforms. Project Chunauti was born out of the need to explore options for these children and to set standards for their care, protection, rehabilitation and social re-integration. The core objectives of the project were to provide support and services, including counseling, education, life skills and vocational skills training, as well as medical and psychiatric support to help them overcome the trauma of abuse and exploitation. Its further goal was to train the staff of state-run homes and state authorities, helping them prepare and implement care plans and rehabilitation, combat child sexual abuse and malnutrition, employ positive disciplining, and better understand disabilities. The book also draws on the Project team's experiences of rolling out the replication process in Maharashtra. This book highlights the role of the courts, media and other stakeholders in the journey towards empowerment and justice. It is a combination of social-work methods, application and implementation of law and legal advocacy, as well as best practices for protecting children's rights and developing rehabilitation and re-integration projects for intellectually disabled, orphaned children in India. The interventions detailed here provide a reproducible, adaptable model of intervention for children in institutional care across the country.

This book addresses new avenues in child abuse prevention research that will expand our capacity to protect children. These new avenues result from the emergence of new research methods made possible through technologic advances, an understanding of the benefits of cross-disciplinary research and learning and the entrance of many young scholars in the field. The book explores what these avenues produce in terms of clarifying the complex problems that continue to limit our progress in addressing child maltreatment and promoting optimal child development. Specifically, the book showcases individual contributions from emerging scholars and show how these scholars use the frameworks and advanced methods to shape their work, apply their findings and define their learning communities. The book highlights the benefits of creating explicit and extended opportunities for researchers to network across disciplines and areas of interest. The primary authors are young scholars from universities across the U.S. who have worked together as Fellows of the Doris Duke Fellowships for the Promotion of Child Well-Being - seeking innovations to prevent child abuse. Through this program, the Fellows have engaged in a robust self-generating learning network designed to create the type of ongoing professional linkages and decision-making style that fosters an interdisciplinary and team planning approach to research design and policy formation.

Never before has world-renowned psychoanalyst Alice Miller examined so persuasively the long-range consequences of childhood abuse on the body. Using the experiences of her patients along with the biographical stories of literary giants such as Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust, Miller shows how a child's humiliation, impotence, and bottled rage will manifest itself as adult illness--be it cancer, stroke, or other debilitating diseases. Never one to shy away from controversy, Miller urges society as a whole to jettison its belief in the Fourth Commandment and not to extend forgiveness to parents whose tyrannical childrearing methods have resulted in unhappy, and often ruined, adult lives. In this empowering work, writes Rutgers professor Philip Greven, "readers will learn how to confront the overt and covert traumas of their own childhoods with the enlightened guidance of Alice Miller."

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aMeticulously researched, compelling written, Abandoned is a highly original study of an inexplicably understudied topic: child abandonment in the nineteenth-century American city. This important book provides a powerful corrective to excessively romanticized views of childhood in the past.a
--Steven Mintz, author of "Huckas Raft: A History of American Childhood"

aFrom Moses to Harry Potter, the stories of abandoned children have always intrigued us, even when we lack humane responses to their situation. In this well-written and insightful book, Miller provides access to the experience of children in the past, as well as the complex world of public and private charities, municipal reformers, clergy, and physicians who interacted with them in nineteenth-century New York City.a
--Joan Jacobs Brumberg, author of "Kansas Charley: The Story of a 19th-Century Boy Murderer"

In the nineteenth century, foundlings--children abandoned by their desperately poor, typically unmarried mothers, usually shortly after birth--were commonplace in European society. There were asylums in every major city to house abandoned babies, and writers made them the heroes of their fiction, most notably Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. In American cities before the Civil War the situation was different, with foundlings relegated to the poorhouse instead of institutions designed specifically for their care. By the eve of the Civil War, New York City in particular had an epidemic of foundlings on its hands due to the rapid and often interlinked phenomena of urban development, population growth, immigration, and mass poverty. Only then did the city'sleaders begin to worry about the welfare and future of its abandoned children.

In Abandoned, Julie Miller offers a fascinating, frustrating, and often heartbreaking history of a once devastating, now forgotten social problem that wracked Americaas biggest metropolis, New York City. Filled with anecdotes and personal stories, Miller traces the shift in attitudes toward foundlings from ignorance, apathy, and sometimes pity for the children and their mothers to that of recognition of the problem as a sign of urban moral decline and in need of systematic intervention. Assistance came from public officials and religious reformers who constructed four institutions: the Nursery and Child's Hospital's foundling asylum, the New York Infant Asylum, the New York Foundling Asylum, and the public Infant Hospital, located on Randall's Island in the East River.

Ultimately, the foundling asylums were unable to significantly improve childrenas lives, and by the early twentieth century, three out of the four foundling asylums closed, as adoption took the place of abandonment and foster care took the place of institutions. Today the word foundling has been largely forgotten. Fortunately, Abandoned rescues its history from obscurity.

Child abuse and neglect (CAN) came to the forefront in the 1960s. At first, theories were spun, usually dealing with the intrapsychic reasons why a parent might en gage in such terrible behavior. The 1970s brought theory that tended to deal in creasingly with sociocultural and ecological explanations forCAN.Itwas not until the 1980s and 1990s, however, thattreatment strategies, research, and legal issues emerged. This book represents a state-of-the-art compilation from the leading figures of today's work in theory, research, and treatment. In addition, this volume presents treatises on cultural issues in CAN, youth violence, sexual abuse, and child devel opmental factors in CAN. The topics covered in this book are based upon empirical research. Although CANhas been professionally discussed since the 1960s, empiricallybased work in the field has been somewhat scarce. Thus, this volume fills a void. It is hoped that this book can be used as a text and reference source for many disciplines. It should be useful in psychology, psychiatry, social work, public health, pediatrics, child development and early childhood education, and law. My own work in CANbegan in 1979. Since then, I have been involved in two large-scale research and service projects aimed at the treatment and prevention of CAN. I have found that the problem appears treatable and preventableif the ap propriate resources are available. ifthe services and research are properly evalu ated, and if staff are trained to measurable performance criteria. Again, this empirical bias can be seen throughout the volume."