Cultural Issues in Child Sexual Abuse Prevention

James Mercy, Senior Scientist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recently proposed that an effective public health response to child sexual abuse must "recognize that the problem of child sexual abuse is not solely a product of the action of individuals, but also the result of societal perspectives on sexual behavior and its expression." But what are these "societal perspectives" on sexual behavior, and how do they vary across differences of culture and gender?

STOP IT NOW! is committed to preventing child sexual abuse in all cultural communities. To do so, we need to understand perspectives and attitudes about sexual behavior within a cultural context without moving towards harmful stereotypes. Because there is little research on differences in understandings of child sexual abuse across cultures, we have worked with community partners and professionals to collect culturally focused information and to develop and test new materials based on that information. In 1998, STOP IT NOW! worked in collaboration with two Philadelphia based organizations, MEE Productions and Philadelphia Health Services, and with Dr. Lisa Fontes, to explore views of child sexual abuse in the local African-American and Latino communities. Together, we conducted eight focus groups with community members. Although we recognize the limitations of this initial research, interesting themes emerged in our analysis of information from these focus groups.

Participants in all groups, regardless of gender or ethnicity, were familiar with the term "child sexual abuse" and recognized that child sexual abuse occurs in their own communities. All of the groups referred most frequently to men abusing young girls and mentioned boys as victims to a lesser extent. Rarely did any group mention women as abusers.

In analyzing the results of the groups by gender, we found some distinct differences: men described child sexual abuse in detailed and explicit terms while women used language that was more euphemistic and vague. When asked for indicators of abuse in an adult who may be abusing, women chose to talk only about behavioral signs in a child who is victimized while men talked about behavioral signs in the abuser as well as in the child.

In our analysis, we also found differences based ethnicity. When asked about the reasons children are at risk for child sexual abuse, African-American groups mentioned both community and institutional factors while Latino groups discussed cultural, immigration and family factors. In discussing specific cases of abuse, African-American groups referred to cases they had seen in their broad communities, while Latino groups talked about cases within their own families.

STOP IT NOW! has developed a new brochure and posters in Spanish based on our findings. We are distributing these materials within the Latino community in Philadelphia. In the spring we conducted training for community professionals on what we have learned and how our findings might be useful for their work with families at risk for sexual abuse.

We recognize that while these are only the first steps toward more culturally appropriate materials, they are crucial to making our prevention approaches more accessible to our country’s multicultural population. We plan to build on these first steps by continuing to strengthen our collaborative relationships in a variety of cultural communities. In the future, we hope to further explore gender differences in understandings of child sexual abuse, and to develop materials that address those differences.

For a more complete summary of our findings and materials, contact STOP IT NOW! or see the article by Fontes, Cruz and Tabachnick in the May 2001 issue of Child Maltreatment.