The Long Shadow of Sexual Abuse

Developmental Effects across the Life Cycle

By (author) Calvin A. Colarusso

Publication date:

06 August 2010

Length of book:

202 pages

Publisher

Jason Aronson, Inc.

ISBN-13: 9780765707666

The Long Shadow of Sexual Abuse: Developmental Effects across the Life Cycle has one simple purpose—to describe the profound interferences with normal developmental processes that occur in every subsequent developmental phase throughout life as the result of chronic child sexual abuse. Through the presentation of detailed case histories of individuals ranging in age from five to the early sixties, Colarusso convincingly demonstrates that the effects are life long. Sections on normal development for childhood, adolescence, young, and middle adulthood are followed by case histories, arranged chronologically according to the age of the victims at the time they were evaluated. Then the effects of the sexual abuse are traced through subsequent developmental phases to the chronological present. Colarusso illuminates how the passage of time actually increases the pathological effects of chronic child sexual abuse due to interferences with the developmental tasks of adolescence and adulthood.

Chapter 1 Preface
Chapter 2 Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 3 Chapter 2: The First Decade of Life
Chapter 4 Chapter 3: Adolescence—Ages Twelve to Twenty
Chapter 5 Chapter 4: Three Adolescent Case Studies
Chapter 6 Chapter 5: Young Adulthood
Chapter 7 Chapter 6: The Decade of the Thirties
Chapter 8 Chapter 7: Middle Adulthood—Ages Forty to Sixty-Five
Chapter 9 Chapter 8: The Sexual Abuse of Six Girls by a Clergyman
Chapter 10 Chapter 9: Four Sisters—The Effect of Chronic Childhood Sexual Abuse on Fifty Years of Adolescent and Adult Development
Chapter 11 Bibliography

W.B. Yeats once wrote, 'The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.' We wish this were so. Those who perpetrate child sexual abuse—whether the lonesome and forlorn or the predatory—are the morbid and timeless contaminants of the beauty and innocence we so cherish in our children. Dr. Calvin Colarusso, the eminent psychoanalyst and pioneer in adult development, brings a passion, depth, and clarity to one of the great scourges of our era, the developmental sequelae of child sexual abuse.