In suspected child sexual abuse some professionals recommend multiple child interviews to increase the likelihood of disclosure or more details to improve decision-making and increase convictions. We modeled the yield of a policy of routinely conducting multiple child interviews and increased convictions. Our decision tree reflected the path of a…

Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) has been associated with HIV/AIDS risk behavior; however, much of this work is retrospective and focuses on women. The current study used semi-parametric mixture modeling with youth (n = 844; 48.8% boys) from the Longitudinal Studies of Child Abuse and Neglect (LONGSCAN) to examine the link between trajectories of CSA…

The "World Report on Children and Violence", (Pinheiro, 2006) was produced at the request of the UN Secretary General and the UN General Assembly. This report recommended improvement in research on child abuse. ISPCAN representatives took this charge and developed 3 new instruments. We describe this background and introduce three new measures…

Objectives: To gain consensus among an ethnically and linguistically diverse group of international child protection experts on the structure and content of a new survey tool for retrospective measurement of child abuse, and to determine the performance of the instrument through an international field trial with young adults. Methods: The…

Objective: To develop a child victimization survey among a diverse group of child protection experts and examine the performance of the instrument through a set of international pilot studies. Methods: The initial draft of the instrument was developed after input from scientists and practitioners representing 40 countries. Volunteers from the…

Objective: Child maltreatment is a problem that has longer recognition in the northern hemisphere and in high-income countries. Recent work has highlighted the nearly universal nature of the problem in other countries but demonstrated the lack of comparability of studies because of the variations in definitions and measures used. The International…

This paper describes development of the Intervention Stressors Inventory, a scale measuring the level of stress that sexually abused children experience from various interventions, such as police interviews, social worker interviews, placement in foster care, and testimony in court. Interviews with 254 sexually abused children and their parents…

Objective: The National Research Council identified inadequate research definitions for abuse and neglect as barriers to research in child maltreatment. We examine the concordance between child protective services (CPS) classifications of maltreatment type with the determinations of type from two research coding systems. We contrast the two coding…

Examined the frequency of children's disclosure of sexual abuse and factors that might influence disclosure. Results, based on 179 children's reports, indicate a 47% disclosure rate. The child's age, siblings in the home, perpetrator other than a biological parent, alleged oral-genital contact or penetration, previous disclosure, and physician…

The research needs in the epidemiology of child sexual abuse are discussed in terms of: a definition of epidemiology, the clash between the medical and legal cultures, statistical concerns, the relationship of social class or poverty with child sexual abuse, the need for cross-cultural research, intervention studies, studies of service…