While Child Sexual Abuse has been around for ages, research on the effects and treatment are fairly recent and date back to the late 70s. To date, there are many books that deal with aspects of abuse and treatment, but there is no volume that takes a comprehensive look at the history, theory and treatment of child and adolescent sexual abuse. The majority of social workers graduate to work with Child and family services and are often inadequately trained to deal with the complexity of sexual abuse.


Confronting Child and Adolescent Sexual abuse is the first textbook to examine all aspects of this type of abuse. The author is a best-selling Pearson author who has written books on child maltreatment and child welfare. The idea of the book came from her frustration of not having a comprehensive book to deal with sexual abuse. While other books offer one or two chapters on sexual abuse, this is a major shortcoming as faculty are often pulling resources together to meet this need.


The book covers all aspects of child and adolescent sexual abuse from the history, theory and treatment to special issues such as pornography and the Internet, Children and adolescents who abuse, Offenders in roles of authority such as teachers, coaches, and clergy and also devotes chapters on assessment, intervention and treatment and prevention.