The Reason for this Volume If we were to judge the seriousness of a psychosocial problem by the attention that the popular media give to it, we would have to conclude that the modem world is in the midst of an epidemic of pedophilic child sexual abuse. One can scarcely go more than a few weeks in any large metropolitan area without reading about one of the community''s upstanding citizens discovered to have been sexually involved with children or adolescents. The attention that the popular media give this topic is paralleled by the attention that it receives in the social sciences, where literally dozens of books and more than a thousand articles have been published on it in the past few years. In fact, "child sexual abuse," along with "co-dependency" and "dysfunctional family," have become the avant-garde psychological cliches of the decade. However, most of the lay and professional literature, although voluminous, reflect a narrow anthropo-, ethno-, and chronocentrism that precludes any real understanding of the topic with anything more than the preconceptions of our times.
