Comparing onanism with child sexual abuse
Onanism and child sexual abuse - A comparative study of two hypotheses
Abstract
For some decades now in the West, there has been a growing social anxiety with regard to a phenomenon which has become known as child sexual abuse (CSA). This anxiety is fed by scientific theories whose cornerstone is the assess- ment of these experiences as necessarily harmful, due to their presumed serious consequences for the present and future lives of the minors involved in them. This principle, widely held by experts and laypersons alike,was also part and parcel of the danger presumably posed by Onanism, a phenomenon which occupied a similar position in society and medical science in the West during the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. The present work is a comparative review of these two hypotheses and the central objective was to compare the evolution and fundamental elements of the two hypotheses in light of what history tells us about Onanism theory. This comparative analysiswill allow a critical look at the assump- tions of the CSA hypothesis in order to make evident the similarities to the conceptual model that enabled the Onan- ism hypothesis in the past. Keywords Child sexual abuse Masturbation Onanism