Bibliographical Essay

Primary sources on historical child sexual assault (CSA) are generally hidden in the archives, largely in court records, but also in medical records and archives from social workers, institutions and charities.

The most readily available historical analysis on CSA in the past is from the Victorian period, especially from Britain. The best overview is Louise Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England (London: Routledge, 2000), which covers all key aspects of CSA. A number of important studies examine girls and prostitution, including Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For an excellent overview of age of consent, see Matthew Waites, The Age of Consent: Young People, Sexuality and Citizenship (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

In the United States, CSA is insightfully covered in Estelle Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), while Stephen Robertson has produced a definitive study of boys and girls in New York in his Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). In Canada, see Constance Backhouse, Carnal Crimes: Sexual Assault Law in Canada, 1900-1975 (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 2008). For Australia, Yorick Smaal has produced an excellent overview of the scholarship, see ‘Historical Perspectives on Child Sexual Abuse, Part 1 and 2', History Compass 11.9 (2013), 702-26. There are far fewer sources on nineteenth-century child sexual assault in Africa, the Asia-Pacific or South America.

There is not necessarily increased historical scholarship on CSA in the twentieth century. There are moments of in-depth analysis: the mid-century legislation and media panic around the ‘sexual psychopath' is one key moment. A series of important works emerged in this period: G. Chauncey, ‘The Postwar Sex Crime Panic', in William Graebner (ed.), True Stories from the American Past (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993); Estelle B. Freedman, ‘“Uncontrolled Desires”: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960', Journal of American History 74.1 (1987), 83-106; Elise Chenier, Strangers in our Midst: Sexual Deviancy in Postwar Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). New work on Australia in the 1950s shows, however, that the prioritising of psychiatric understandings of offenders was not universal: see Lisa Featherstone and Andy Kaladelfos, Sex Crimes in the Fifties (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2016).

By the 1970s and 1980s, feminist research on CSA proliferated. Some, including Linda Gordon's Heroes of their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston 1880-1960 (London: Virago, 1989) considered earlier historical periods, but were heavily infiltrated with second-wave feminist ideas about violence and patriarchy. Further work on CSA was more present centred, with sociologists and various therapists producing qualitative and quantitative research, all being useful sources for the historian of the recent past. Other important historical studies engaged with the 1970s and 1980s as a transformative period, including Philip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

More recently, there are multiple studies of CSA across all regions.

Overall, there has been some exceptional scholarship detailing a hidden past of CSA in some nations. However, far more research is needed, in both developed and developing nations, to uncover more about the extent of CSA; its policing and judicial approaches; and outcomes for both offenders and victims.