ABSTRACT
It was primarily during the 1980s that practitioners began to recognize that adolescents are capable of committing sexual offenses. Work being done with adult sexual offenders was finding that a large number of self-reports admitted to this behavior having started as early as age 12. This is the same era when sexual victimization was being recognized. In the late 1970s, adult women who began to disclose sexual abuse indicated that frequently the victimization had occurred when they were children. The feminist movement allowed these individuals to tell their stories and the helping professions began to realize that if these women had been sexually abused in the past as children, sexual abuse among the current generation of children was probably happening as well.
