Child Sexual Abuse Victims In The Courts

This book, the first to examine the experience of child victims their families who attempt to seek justice in America's courts, offers practical reforms that would bring greater sensitivity justice to the legal process. Reviewing American legal history the equivocal treatment of children sex crimes, Dziech Schudson explain how current courtroom procedures often fail to acknowledge a child's abilities needs, how child witnesses are often re-victimized by the legal system that is supposed to help them. They argue that there is no justification for subjecting abused children to a second round of trauma -- in court. This important book recommends sweeping changes to assure justice for children, their families, those accused of harming them.

Reviews new research on the consequences of child sexual abuse, the capabilities of children as witnesses, and the impact of the court process on child victims. Also analyzes pertinent statutes and case law. 16 charts and tables.

Prosecuted But Not Silenced is a powerful documentary about a mother and daughter's tragic involvement with the judicial system when there were allegations of child sexual abuse—a human rights and civil rights issue for women and children. It is an important educational tool for judges, lawyers, social workers, therapists, politicians, and the general public so that people realize what still occurs today. A National Health Crisis, Maralee’s story reveals the last taboo and a crime that needs the public's attention, and emphasizes the need for training in the dynamics of maltreatment so that no more mothers have to suffer what happened to Maralee and her daughter.

This book is based on award-winning research that analyzes transcripts of intrafamilial child sexual abuse trials. Building on the contemporary focus of legal trials as hegemonic sites of storytelling from the perspectives of dominant interest groups, the argument is developed in three steps. The first documents the development of a de facto relationship between law and psychiatry that simultaneously silences and blames victims of sexual violence, and advances a critique of law as narrative. The second presents a detailed, critical, feminist reading of six trials that are presented as textual case studies. These show the legal mechanisms through which victim/survivor's accounts of abuse are transmuted into forms that facilitate the legal and theoretical acquittal of the alleged abuser and replicates - at symbolic and structural levels - those power relations inherent in the original abuse. The final step in the argument analyzes and synthesizes the structural and thematic patterns in the case studies to show how trials enact a narrative template that maintain a patriarchal status quo around intrafamilial child sexual abuse.

"Describes the first systematic, longitudinal investigation of the long-term outcomes for adolescents and young adults who were involved in criminal court prosecutions as child sexual abuse victims ... Testifying repeatedly, especially in cases involving severe abuse, continued to predict adverse mental health consequences over time ... Children's developmental level at the time of the legal case also played an important role in predicting long-term outcomes. Overall, findings highlight the need to consider multiple factors when assessing consequences of legal involvement on child victims"--Back cover.