The Sexualization of Childhood (Childhood in America) by Sharna Olfman

Author:Sharna Olfman
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi, pdf
Published: 2019-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

She saw the mirror as her enemy. Every time she wanted to brush her hair or apply her makeup, the obese 16-year-old teen recalled having to recite her "script" over and over in front of her mirror. The offender was nearby, always correcting her and telling her to say it his way. For 3 years, her stepfather had forced her to have sex with him and to perform nude erotic dances in front of a video camera, reciting the script describing that all of her actions were her idea and a means to get even with an overly strict father. She'd had to say it more than a thousand times. He's assaulted her sexually more than 200 times..... she knew because she'd kept count on a secret calendar. He would videotape his sexual abuse of her at the end of her "stripper routine." She believed his threat that he would send one of the hundreds of DVDs that he'd made of her to a contact in another state with instructions to flood the Internet with her videos if he failed to call by a certain date every month. Over the 3 years, the videos reflected her worsening weight gain.

Many professionals are just becoming competent in computerbased skills, so that they can understand that the sheer volume of child pornography on the Internet as well as the amount in the possession of an offender precludes the possibility that all of the images are morphed virtual avatars, that they were acquired serendipitously while an offender was "Web surfing," or that all of the images are adults posing as children. All of these presumptions have been previously posed rationalizations, even in courts of law. The rescue of known victims has revealed that on many occasions no efforts were made by the offenders to disguise the child or make them appear to be older than they actually were. In addition, information regarding known victims of child sexual abuse images reveals that nearly 70 percent of the images were made by immediate family members, relatives, or close acquaintances. 14

An additional quandary in child pornography cases entails the techniques of forensic interviewing when pictures are involved. When careful questioning has allowed a young child to disclose historical aspects of sexual abuse, but child pornography is omitted even though this contraband sparked the investigation, interviewers must recognize that at times the child's defense mechanisms are too great to acknowledge this aspect of their victimization. Interviewers must be very careful not to place the child in a position to deny the existence of images because this is often the only aspect of the investigation in which there is objective evidence. Much research has confirmed that the actual physical examination of the child is likely to be normal, despite visual pornographic confirmation of repeated vaginal, oral, or anal penetration by an adult male.15

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