UNICEF has called child sexual assault ‘a fundamental violation of children's rights',1 while the World Health Organization (WHO) has named it a ‘serious infringement on a child's right to health and protection'.[234] [235]

Yet child sexual assault has been a common experience of many children, now and in the past. This chapter will explore child sexual abuse (CSA) across the modern age, while acknowledging at the outset that attitudes towards sexual assaults on children vary significantly across time and place.

Knowledge about sexual violence in the past is limited by inadequate access to primary-source information. When the data are available, they come from policing documents, court records, medical sources, government statistics and studies, autobiographical stories and oral histories. There are inconsistent and patchy records on child sexual assault in the nineteenth century (and before) in some jurisdictions in Europe, the United States and Australia. But there has been almost no historical research on CSA in many regions of the world, due to the difficulty or impossibility of accessing sources; social and political tensions around child sex; and the prioritising of other urgent problems including war, poverty, displacement and disease. In many cases, data have been destroyed, lost or never adequately collected or archived. It is therefore impossible to offer a comprehensive and detailed analysis of rates of child sexual assault in the global past. We can, however, examine changing attitudes towards CSA, including moments of change in awareness around sexual assaults on minors; altering definitions of criminality; the prosecution of offences; and differences in media debates over sexual violence against chil­dren. Even so, some periods and regions remain better covered than others.

Since the 1970s and 1980s, there has been an escalation in studies of CSA, including a new focus on qualitative and quantitative data; the development of treatment regimens for victims and perpetrators; and a growing public aware­ness, fed by media attention. Yet, as this chapter shows, child sexual assault was not ‘discovered' in the 1970s. It changed shape, and interest was perhaps professionalised, but the two centuries before had also shown knowledge of, and fear around, sexual violence against children in many nations, evidenced by legislation, policing, prosecution and media reports. Children have long been seen as vulnerable to sexual abuse in numerous forms, assaults which were, in theory, viewed as both criminal offences and morally corrupt. Yet, almost paradoxically, state and community practices failed to and continue to fail to protect children, as recent large-scale studies have proven. The problem of violence against children is an enduring one that crosses the globe.