Abstract
Nancy Whittier’s The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Emotion, Social Movements, and the State describes thirty years of advocacy against child sex abuse. The book delivers a valuable challenge to explanations based in moral panic that devalue both the existence of the problem and the efficacy of those who have organized against it. Whittier gives voice to brave women and men who have insisted on their value, and who have rejected excuses for child sexual abuse. Politics will be appreciated by scholars in gender studies, deviance, and law and society.
The account of how child sexual abuse became and has remained such a salient concern for culture and politics has been told before, but not through this kind of detailed interview and archival data. While past analyses have explained the uneasy coalescence of conservative family value movements with feminist and child protection advocacy, Whittier’s data allow more nuanced understandings of the many groups, goals, successes, and co-optations that characterize the social movements against child sexual abuse from 1970 through 2000. Politics is organized around Whittier’s identification of five phases, which present rich new views of advocates who have been criticized for losing their critical edge. Instead, Whittier shows that the various groups worked with the available cultural discourses, and a selection process (p. 15) determined which tactics received widespread attention. In particular, feminist critiques of patriarchy and other structural arguments lost out to the pathologizing and criminalizing that had greater resonance with politics and other public priorities.
In the feminist phase (1970s-1980), feminists “sought cultural change through the creation of new knowledge about sexual abuse” (p. 7) that fed into a feminist self-help phase (1980–82) which challenged professional therapy and popularized therapeutic tools. These foundational phases are important to distinguish from the single issue self-help phase (1981–92) which was roundly criticized in the wider culture and within feminist and other scholarship for its perceived over-reliance on recovered memory. This spawned the countermovement (1992–2000) which will be familiar to many in the academy and which threatened to undo much of the movement’s credibility and impact. But the post-countermovement phase (late 1990s to the present) is marked by a continued politics of visibility (Chapter Seven, especially pages 167–169) as well as a wing of the movement directly involved in state practices, including service provision.
The author’s forty interviews with advocates form the core of the book and, combined with the theoretical tools that examine social movements and the therapeutic state, provide a significant contribution. From a work of sociology, readers would expect more explanation of the sampling frame, including a justification of the author’s contention that her subjects are representative. Readers will also notice the lack of discussion of the author’s subject position, including any potential biases she may bring to the research and analysis. This is an unfortunate absence, since the book’s largely optimistic view of movement efficacy may be related to the inclination to empathize with the impressive interview subjects, perhaps leading to a confirmation bias.
Clearly, much has changed. However whether there is a causal link between the particular advocacy she describes and the salience of child victimization remains unclear, especially given the historical evidence showing that such concerns, although varying in their details, have driven law and shaped culture for decades, if not centuries (p. 7; see also Leon 2011). It would also be interesting to examine whether the overall drop in reported child abuse bears any relationship to the social movements, a drop noted but not examined in this book (p. 216 n. 1; Finkelhor and Jones 2006)
In general, Politics highlights the need for a systematic analysis of movement “success” and its definitions. The book begins with sweeping claims, and does provide convincing evidence of political and attitudinal change. But these do not entirely support the broad claims. Within the text, success is sometimes measured as increased awareness, including the achievement of recognition of male victims. But as the conclusion discusses, this success is complicated by the gender privilege and homophobia that have prioritized male victims of Catholic priests, for example. Other markers of success include increased access to treatment from professionals who approach survivors with empathy, and new laws and policies that aim at child protection.
But we should not celebrate for long: despite the intense awareness of child sexual abuse that certainly characterizes the current time, little evidence shows headway in addressing the pervasive myth of stranger danger. Our continued assumption that the biggest threats to our children are unknown monsters prevents the kind of mobilization we must take as a society to insist that our government invests deeply in truly preventative efforts, which would include empowering and aiding families, challenging patriarchy and the valorization of aggression, and combating sexism and sexualization of youth by our media.