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Crimes Against Children
| Article
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13946 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1988 |
2,748 Words |
| Author
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Diane McGuinness
Diane McGuinness is associate professor of psychology at the
University of South Florida and the author of When Children
Don't Learn. |
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
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