American Journal of Applied Psychology

Special Issue

Male Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse

  • Submission Deadline: Oct. 30, 2015
  • Status: Submission Closed
  • Lead Guest Editor: Sharon Gil
About This Special Issue
Only in the late 1970s, in the context of the feminist movement, did childhood sexual abuse (CSA) began to acquire public awareness and, consequently, increased research attention. Since then, CSA has become a universal concern of researchers and welfare policy determiners and practitioners. Yet, influenced by the feminist struggle to bring women's voices to the fore, studies in the field focused mainly on female victims of male perpetrators, overlooking other forms of CSA.

More recently, studies have begun to explore males as victims of CSA (Barth, Bermetz, Heim, Trelle, & Tonia, 2012), showing that 3%-17% of adult men have been victimized by male and female perpetrators (Dube, Anda, Whitfield, et al., 2005). CSA of boys is acknowledged increasingly and can no longer be overlooked. Still, research in the field is relatively rare, and focuses mainly on case studies. Moreover, documentation shows that welfare workers are less likely to validate cases involving male victims of CSA, and that the victims themselves are reluctant to report the abuse (Barth, Bermetz, Heim, Trelle, & Tonia, 2012).

To date, much of the knowledge regarding CSA is still based on studying female victims. Yet, considering the profound differences between males and females, the phenomenon of male adult victims of CSA deserves exclusive attribution. Accordingly, the special issue will present current knowledge regarding this phenomenon. It will invite scholars to present epidemiological, qualitative and quantitative empirical studies as well as clinical papers in the field, thereby expanding the theoretical, empirical and practical understanding of the unique male experience of sexual victimization during childhood and its consequences.
Lead Guest Editor
  • Sharon Gil

    School of Social Work, Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Sciences, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

Guest Editors
  • Michael Weinberg

    School of Social Work, Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Sciences, University of Haifa, Haifa,, Israel