ABSTRACT
Since a recognition of the pervasiveness of child sexual abuse first captured our attention, a number of models of intervention have been used with this problem. This multiplicity of approaches reflects, in part, the ideological and conceptual diversity of the many different practitioners and social activists who first brought child sexual abuse to professional and public awareness and who helped elevate it to the status of a social problem. These persons included researchers and clinicians in the child maltreatment and family violence fields who were broadening their previous focus from physical child abuse and the battered child syndrome (De Francis, 1969; Kempe, 1977), feminists who were providing a revisionist view of rape and other forms of sexual violence against women (Brownmiller, 1975; Herman & Hirshman, 1977), persons in the family therapy field who were applying cybernetic concepts to the problem of incest (Eist & Mandel, 1968; Machotka, Pittman, & Flomenshaft, 1967), clinicians and historians who were critically re-evaluating the work of Sigmund Freud (Masson, 1984; Rosenfeld, 1977; Rush, 1980), and persons who began treating child victims and their families because of an unconventional willingness to acknowledge the existence and magnitude of this problem (Burgess, Groth, Holmstrom, & Sgroi, 1978; Giaretto, 1976; Summit & Kryso, 1978). Importantly, during the formative years of the field, each of these groups worked in relative isolation and each approached the problem of child sexual abuse with its own unique set of conceptual and political premises and its own political agenda. Not surprisingly, the therapeutic approaches that were developed by these groups were often philosophically antagonistic and methodologically varied (Sturkie, 1986).
