Child sexual abuse: Purity and danger in an age of anxiety

This paper examines the emergence and development of child sexual abuse (CSA) as a social problem in the main English-speaking societies in the post 1970s period. In contrast to prevailing explanations in moral panic and feminist literature, it illustrates how this problem has become knowable and understandable to us as a new kind of risk. This is the result of the positioning of child sexual abuse between the tensions, uncertainties and anxieties characteristic of ‘the age of anxiety’ on the one hand, and the cultural understandings that have come to be associated with purity and danger in this period on the other.