CHICAGO -- Increased national attention to child abuse has prompted researchers to wonder if the incidence of the problem has increased, or just willingness to discuss a taboo subject.
Two reports released over the weekend suggest abuse itself is increasing.
Writing Sunday in the journal Pediatrics, Dr. John Leventhal of the Yale University School of Medicine said that since the 1940s sexual abuse of children has become more common, more serious and more likely to be committed by an adult relative or friend of a child.
Comparing studies done by famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s and another study done by Diana Russell in 1978, Leventhal said the 1978 study showed a 'higher prevalence of sexual abuse, a greater proportion of perpetrators who were relatives or adults known by the child, and a greater proportion of serious types of abuse.'
Kinsey's study -- still the largest ever conducted on the prevalence of sexual abuse -- showed 24 percent of the 4,441 women interviewed had had at least one pre-adolescent sexual contact with an adult male.
Half of these women said the abuse included no physical contact, but rather verbal abuse or genital exhibition. About the same percentage said strangers were the perpetrators of the acts, while 22 percent said family members -- typically an uncle -- were responsible.
Kinsey included women from 48 states but excluded black women and women who had been in prison. In contrast, Russell interviewed only women in the San Francisco area. Her interviews of 930 randomly selected women showed 48 percent experienced at least one incident of sexual abuse before age 14.
Russell found 29 percent of the incidents of physical contact involved relatives, 60 percent involved other acquaintences and 11 percent involved strangers. Where Kinsey found 8 percent of women had been victims of 'very serious' abuse, Russell found 23 percent experienced this level of abuse.
Leventhal said the two studies and another recent study suggest 'exhibitionism has decreased during the 20th century.'
Leventhal acknowledged that 'there would have been a great reluctance to talk about such matters in the 1940s,' leading to some under-reporting in Kinsey's study. When Russell's study was conducted 28 years later, state laws required reporting of abuse to child protection agencies.
Also, he said, 'San Francisco is not necessarily representative of the United States,' with an over-estimate possible in Russell's study if 'women who had been sexually abused preferentialy migrated to a city like San Francisco, with its more liberal attitudes toward sexuality.'
In spite of the differences in the way the two studies were conducted, Leventhal concluded it is likely 'there have been real changes in the 20th century in the epidemiology of sexual abuse.'
Within Russell's data, a trend showed that the more recently a woman was born, the more likely she was to have been abused by a family member.
A separate study released over the weekend by the National Committee for Prevention of Child Abuse bolstered and extended Leventhal's findings to recent years. That study, presented during a convention in Philadelphia by the National Association of Social Workers showed the number of reported child abuse and neglect deaths increased from 899 to 1,132 between 1985 and 1987.
But after surveying welfare departments from all 50 states, the researchers concluded that thousands of additional child abuse deaths nationwide each year have been 'misclassified' as accident, disease or suicide.
The study said hundreds of the 8,000 accident deaths could be abuse- or neglect-related and about 10 percent of the 5,200 children who committed suicide could be classified as victims of serious physical, sexual or emotional abuse at the time they died.
