Psycho dynamic formulations have generally been made regarding particular traits, historical events, or underlying personality dynamics that characterize the various participants in the incestuous relationship. A myriad of speculations have been proposed with regard to what the father, the mother, and the child are like in an incestuous family.

While there is a great deal of information published about family dynamics in cases of sexual abuse of children, there is little or nothing written about the family dynamics that occur when a child victim is of preschool age. The overwhelming majority of case studies and published reports deal with dynamics occurring in incestuous families in which the children...

Evaluating the outcome of treatment with sexually abused children has been woefully inadequate so far. Most results have been presented in terms of the therapists' opinion about improvement. Giarretto (1976) did present treatment results in terms of objective criteria; he reported...

Another treatment parameter in child sexual abuse is length of treatment: Should it be short term or long term? Leaman (1980) asserts that a crisis intervention model can be very helpful in immediately helping the family to gain an intellectual understanding of the incident, helping family members bring their feelings into the open, exploring coping mechanisms, and making plans to reduce further trauma to the child.

In a preschool play therapy setting, Haase, Magaz, Lazoritz, and Chiaro (1982) describe a treatment program for sexually abused children under the age of 5 years. Through structured and unstructured play, the program attempts to provide a safe, nurturing...

Most information available about individual therapy with child sexual abuse victims comes from case reports, involving either a single case or several cases treated over a period of time. The children described were school age or adolescent, and some treatment successes were reported using psychoanalytically oriented long term therapy.

While interest in and concern about sexual molestation of preschool children have been increasing, treatment plans and therapeutic issues for young sexually abused children have rarely been addressed. Generally, references have been made in passing to the use of play or arts therapy in treating young, cognitively unsophisticated victims.

Many times, ethnic minorities as well as lower SES clients face inconsistent delivery of services in the legal system. Wright (1982) reports that in a review of the prison sentences of 12 Afro American fathers participating in a group for incest perpetrators, 7 of them (58%) were incarcerated.

Given that ethnic minorities continue to underutilize mental health services, many are unclear about the therapeutic process. Clients who are disclosing evidence about child sexual abuse for the first time will almost never expect the often chaotic series of responses from legal, child protective, medical, and psychological agencies that typically follow such disclosure.

Related to the problem of language barriers is the issue of differential perspectives about sexuality among sociocultural groups. Some groups seem to equate sexual ignorance with sexual innocence. They may have a strong sociocultural tradition that values sexual innocence among their female members.