April 10, 2025, 1-3pm CDT on Zoom

This talk will make these points about online child sexual abuse:

• Current stereotypes of the problem are misleading.
• An unfortunate overwhelming primary emphasis is being placed on stranger danger
• There is considerable unrecognized diversity to the problem
• Victim perspective yields insights missed by police perspective
• Prevention of this problem needs new ideas

Presenter’s Bio: David Finkelhor is the Director of Crimes against Children Research Center, Co-Director of the Family Research Laboratory, Professor of Sociology, and University Professor, at the University of New Hampshire. He has been studying the problems of child victimization, child maltreatment and family violence since 1977. David is best known for his conceptual and empirical work on the problem of child sexual abuse, reflected in publications such as Sourcebook on Child Sexual Abuse (Sage, 1986) and Nursery Crimes (Sage, 1988). He has also written about child homicide, missing and abducted children, children exposed to domestic and peer violence, commercial sexual exploitation and internet victimization. David is the co-founder of several large national data collection efforts including the National Survey of Children Exposed to Violence (NatSCEV) and the National Incidence Study of Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Thrownaway Children (NISMART). 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. Altogether, he is the editor and author of 12 books and over 250 journal articles and book chapters. David 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.