David Finkelhor: “Children and youth are the most crime-victimized segment of society”
David Finkelhoris Director of the Crimes against Children Research Center, Co-Director of the Family Research Laboratory, Professor of Sociology, and University Professor at the University of New Hampshire. He has been studying the problems of child victimization, child maltreatment and family violence since 1977. He is well known for his conceptual and empirical work on the problem of child sexual abuse, reflected in publications such as Sourcebook on Child Sexual Abuse (Sage, 1986) and Nursery Crimes (Sage, 1988). He has also written about child homicide, missing and abducted children, children exposed to domestic and peer violence and other forms of family violence. In his recent work, for example his book Child Victimization (Oxford University Press, 2008), he has tried to unify and integrate knowledge about the diverse forms of child victimization in a field he has termed ʻdevelopmental victimologyʼ. The book received the Daniel Douglas Schneider Child Welfare Book Award in 2009. He is the editor and author of 12 books and over 200 journal articles and book chapters. He has received grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, the US Department of Justice and a variety of other sources. In 1994 he was given the Distinguished Child Abuse Professional Award by the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, in 2004 he was given the Significant Achievement Award by the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, in 2005 he and his colleagues received the Child Maltreatment Article of the Year award, and in 2007 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology.
David Finkelhoris Director of the Crimes against Children Research Center, Co-Director of the Family Research Laboratory, Professor of Sociology, and University Professor at the University of New Hampshire. He has been studying the problems of child victimization, child maltreatment and family violence since 1977. He is well known for his conceptual and empirical work on the problem of child sexual abuse, reflected in publications such as Sourcebook on Child Sexual Abuse (Sage, 1986) and Nursery Crimes (Sage, 1988). He has also written about child homicide, missing and abducted children, children exposed to domestic and peer violence and other forms of family violence. In his recent work, for example his book Child Victimization (Oxford University Press, 2008), he has tried to unify and integrate knowledge about the diverse forms of child victimization in a field he has termed ʻdevelopmental victimologyʼ. The book received the Daniel Douglas Schneider Child Welfare Book Award in 2009. He is the editor and author of 12 books and over 200 journal articles and book chapters. He has received grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, the US Department of Justice and a variety of other sources. In 1994 he was given the Distinguished Child Abuse Professional Award by the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, in 2004 he was given the Significant Achievement Award by the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, in 2005 he and his colleagues received the Child Maltreatment Article of the Year award, and in 2007 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology.
Broadly speaking, why are children so victimized?
First, an obvious reason why children are at greater risk risk: in general children are smaller, they are weaker, they are less experienced, and they depend on others for their survival. And they havenʼt learned the strategies for reducing conflict or staying safe that come with life experience. A second reason children are victimized so much is that society is ambivalent about protecting them. Society has a powerful, institutional system organized to protect people from victimization. By this I mean laws, police, prosecutors and the courts. A third reason for greater risk of victimization among children is that some children do some pretty risky things. Some groups of older children in particular are more prone to violate norms: stealing, vandalism, hanging out in gangs… Criminologists have found that children who suffer victimization are often the same ones that commit crimes. But while doing foolish things increases your risk of victimization, itʼs a vast exaggeration to say that children are victims because they are offenders. But there is another, less obvious reason why children are at high risk of victimization, and this has to do with the conditions of their social lives and living arrangements. They donʼt choose their families, they donʼt choose their neighborhoods and they donʼt choose their schools.
are they?
We have an interesting, myopic view when it comes to violence against children. There are some forms we see absolutely clearly and empathize with acutely. But there are others that are very difficult to spot. One assumption is that children are somehow less affected by violence than adults, or that they are more resilient to it or recover more quickly. Notice, though, how in the case of sexual abuse we have changed that assumption. The idea that this type of contact would be more traumatic for a child than an adult is also easily accepted, but it is much harder to accept when weʼre talking about physical assault or bullying, and in fact the opposite is assumed. Here is another assumption that prevents adults from taking certain forms of child victimization - particularly non-sexual ones - as seriously as they would if they concerned adults: the idea that victimization and violent confrontations can be character building. “You need to learn to stand up to bullies. You need to learn to defend yourself.” If we view these as salutary and educational experiences, it is difficult to simultaneously treat them as victimizing, traumatic and criminal. A third interesting assumption about child victimization, in particular physical assaults perpetrated by other children, is that it is less serious and beyond the bounds of adult intervention because it is more “mutual”.
What political and social interventions should be implemented in
order to change this situation?
First, we need to assess all children for a broad range of victimizations. When they are identified as having been sexually abused, we need to find out what else is going on. When they are identified as having been bullied, we need to find out what else is going on. We need to get all their vulnerabilities into the picture. Second, I think we need to give priority attention to poly-victims. We need to support them clinically. We need to learn to identify who they are in schools, in caseloads, in the juvenile justice system. These are certainly children who deserve priority in our interventions. Therefore, we also need multi-victimization intervention models. That means therapies canʼt just focus on sexual abuse alone. They have to address the spectrum of victimizations the children suffer from. This also means that we have to broaden the child protection service approach. An intervention system that only helps children with threats from family members is too narrow. I think CPS workers have to be trained in multi-victimization assessment, like police are trained in multi-crime assessment. They have to have service responses that are pertinent to all the varieties of threats children face. They have to be prepared to work with law enforcement and educators and other mental health professionals.