ABSTRACT
Since a recognition o f the pervasiveness o f child sexual abuse first captured our attention, a number o f models o f intervention have been used with this problem. This multiplicity o f approaches reflects, in part, the ideological and conceptual diversity o f the many different practitio ners and social activists who first brought child sexual abuse to pro fessional 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 provid ing a revisionist view o f rape and other forms o f sexual violence against women (Brownmiller, 1975; Herman & Hirshman, 1977), persons in the family therapy field who were applying cybernetic concepts to the prob lem o f incest (Eist & Mandel, 1968; Machotka, Pittman, & Flomenshaft, 1967), clinicians and historians who were critically re-evaluating the work o f Sigmund Freud (Masson, 1984; Rosenfeld, 1977; Rush, 1980), and persons who began treating child victims and their families because o f an unconventional willingness to acknowledge the existence and m ag nitude o f this problem (Burgess, Groth, Holmstrom, & Sgroi, 1978; Giaretto, 1976; Summit 8c Kryso, 1978). Importantly, during the form a tive years o f the field, each of these groups worked in relative isolation and each approached the problem o f child sexual abuse with its own unique set o f conceptual and political premises and its own political agenda. Not surprisingly, the therapeutic approaches that were de veloped by these groups were often philosophically antagonistic and methodologically varied (Sturkie, 1986).
