Revictimizing Child Abuse Victims: An Empirical Rebuttal to the Open Juvenile Dependency Court Reform Movement

Abstract

This article presents a summary of contemporary child and adolescent psychiatric data demonstrating the short and long-term psychological harm to child abuse victims forced to testify in public hearings. In addition, it provides an empirical study of the numerous instances in which the press has published identifying information about child abuse victims and discusses the psychiatric literature that delineates how that public exposure exacerbates abuse children’s psychopathology and makes therapeutic intervention more difficult and more protracted.