ABSTRACT
How we theorize, recognize, talk about and act in relation to child sexual abuse changes according to history, geography, culture, law and social policy. As such, in order to understand what child sexual abuse is, it is necessary to be speci®c about the various issues that shape where we speak from and what we speak about. In this chapter, I begin the process of making my ways of understanding explicit by identifying some of the key theoretical practices that underpin my approach to making sense of, and working with, the effects of child sexual abuse as they relate to women and girls across the age span. This book, therefore, addresses issues that affect adult women, as well as children and young people (with the focus being on girls). As with other books in this edited series, I draw on ideas from outside psychology. In part this is because psychology has a tendency to individualize complex social problems, such as child sexual abuse. Additionally, psychology is too often viewed as an impartial practice, in which perspective is viewed with suspicion. By contrast, not only do I think that perspective is always implicated in our meaning-making, but also my political beliefs are integral to what I want to achieve with psychology.
