Twice Silenced: The Underreporting of Child Sexual Abuse in Orthodox Jewish Communities.

Child sexual abuse remains an underreported crime throughout the world, despite extensive research and resources dedicated both to improving investigative techniques and helping children disclose their experiences. The discovery of rampant cover-ups within the Catholic Church has exposed some of the ways religious and cultural issues can impede reporting to authorities. This article examines specific factors that contribute to the underreporting of child sexual abuse within Orthodox Jewish communities. It also explores ways in which these communities have handled child sexual abuse reporting in the past and describes recent progress. Implications are offered for CSA prevention, detection, and recovery in Orthodox Jewish communities as well as other minority religious groups.

Catholicism and childhood sexual abuse: women's coping and psychotherapy.

The long-term effects of child sexual abuse include numerous psychological, social, and behavioral difficulties in women survivors, ranging from poor self-esteem and depression to sexual disorders and posttraumatic stress disorder. The role that religious beliefs may play in the difficulties these women suffer has been largely unexplored. This qualitative study explored women's experience of healing within the context of Catholicism. Interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of eight women raised as Catholics who reported child sexual abuse and who had participated in at least two years of psychotherapy. Results suggest that Catholic identity can both compound and relieve the suffering many women experience in healing from child sexual abuse. Participants related that their Catholicism was rarely addressed during psychotherapy. These findings have implications for clinicians working with Catholic survivors of child sexual abuse.

Cultural issues in disclosures of child sexual abuse.

Cultural norms affect the likelihood that child sexual abuse will be discovered by an adult or disclosed by a child. Cultural norms also affect whether abused children's families will report child sexual abuse to authorities. This article explores the ways ethnic and religious culture affect child sexual abuse disclosure and reporting, both in the United States and internationally. Guidelines for culturally sensitive child abuse interviewing are provided to facilitate disclosures of abuse from culturally diverse children in formal settings.

Sin vergüenza: addressing shame with Latino victims of child sexual abuse and their families.

This article explores shame issues for Latino children who have been sexually abused and their families. Latino cultural concerns around shame that are associated with sexual abuse include: attributions for the abuse, fatalism, virginity, sexual taboos, predictions of a shameful future, revictimization, machismo, and fears of homosexuality for boy victims, and the intersection of shame from sexual abuse with societal discrimination. Quotes and case material are drawn from the author's research and clinical work. The article includes clinical suggestions.

Ethics in violence against women research: the sensitive, the dangerous, and the overlooked.

Traditional disciplinary guidelines are inadequate to address some of the ethical dilemmas that emerge when conducting research on violence against women and girls. This article is organized according to the ethical principles of respect for persons, privacy and confidentiality, justice, beneficence, and nonmaleficence. In the article, I describe dilemmas involved in cross-cultural research, research on children, informed consent, voluntariness, coercion, deception, safety, mandated reporting, and dissemination. In the article, I include examples from qualitative and quantitative studies in many nations. I also offer suggestions for researchers and institutional review boards.