What is Known About the Magnitude, Trend, and Risk for Child Sexual Abuse and the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the United States?

ABSTRACT

Many nationally representative datasets are available for assessing the magnitude, trend, and risk for child sexual victimization in the United States. Unfortunately, the disaggregation of sexual violence into more specific sex crimes and the reliable measurement of these specific acts are often avoided by researchers due to the methodological limitations of victimization data. For example, previous scholars have successfully measured the strength of the relationship between the commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) and child sexual abuse (CSA) within their respective samples; however, little is known about the extent to which CSEC occurs in the larger U.S. population, irrespective of past CSA. This study presents new analyses of publicly available representative data on the incidence, trend, and risk for CSA and CSEC independent of one another. We find that significantly more is known about CSA than CSEC. In addition, while victims of CSA and CSEC share many risk factors, CSA is far more common than CSEC, and their trends are going in different directions. We find that rates of CSA and CSEC are often derived from data with significant methodological limitations, such as administrative datasets that are limited to only victimizations reported to governmental agencies or representative surveys that measure the incidence/prevalence in one year alone, not repeatedly as required to assess trends. We fill in some of the gaps existing in our analyses with a review of other studies examining CSA and CSEC, as well as discuss future directions in research that researchers and child welfare practitioners should consider.

KEYWORDS:

• Child sex abuse
• commercial sexual exploitation of children
• correlates of victimization
• trends in victimization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported that there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Maribeth L. Rezey

Maribeth L. Rezey is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Loyola University Chicago. Her research focuses on the use of quantitative methodologies to understand macro-level trends in criminal victimization. Dr. Rezey’s work has recently appeared in the Annual Review of Criminology, the Journal of Research in Crime & Delinquency, Child Abuse & Neglect, and the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.

Maria DiMeglio

Maria DiMeglio is a current graduate student at Loyola University Chicago, as well as a research analyst at a local law enforcement agency.