Director, Crimes against Children Research Center, University of New Hampshire

“The Diversity of Online Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation”

Recent research suggests much online sexual abuse occurs in the context of peer relationships and teen exploration of sex and romance. Prevention efforts need to partner more with sex education, teen dating violence and bullying prevention programming. Current stereotypes of the problem are misleading. The emphasis on stranger danger obscures diversity of the problem.
Online safety needs a restart and more integration into existing successful prevention modalities

About David Finkelhor
 
David Finkelhor is Director of Crimes against Children Research Center, Professor of Sociology, and University Professor at the University of New Hampshire.  His core areas of interest have been in child maltreatment and family violence, dating back in 1977.  He is perhaps best known for his conceptual and empirical work on the problem of child sexual abuse, including prevalence surveys, his Four Pre-conditions Model of Sexual Abuse, and his Four Traumagenic Dynamics Model of sexual abuse trauma.  He also helped develop the concept of “poly-victimization.” 

In addition, he has done extensive research about child homicide, missing and abducted children, bullying, and Internet victimization.  In his recent work, for example, his book, Child Victimization (Oxford University Press, 2008), he has tried to unify and integrate knowledge about all the diverse forms of child victimization in a field he has termed Developmental Victimology. This book received the Daniel Schneider Child Welfare Book of the Year award in 2009. He has also written extensively about trends in child maltreatment. All together he is editor and author of 12 books and over 200 journal articles and book chapters.  He has received grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, and the US Department of Justice, and a variety of other sources. 

In 1994, he was given the Distinguished Child Abuse Professional Award by the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, in 2004 he was given the Significant Achievement Award from the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, in 2005 he and his colleagues received the Child Maltreatment Article of the Year award, in 2007 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology, and in 2014 he was awarded the National Scientific Impact Award from the Kempe Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect.