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THE POLICY FORUM “THE SCIENCE OF CHILD sexual abuse” by J. J. Freyd et al. (22 Apr., p. 501) provides an extremely important call to action to the scientific community.  In 1999, James Mercy, Senior Scientist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, noted the importance of viewing child sexual abuse with “new eyes” (1).  The implementation of Freyd et al.’s policy recommendations would help us to do this.  For too long, the fact that the topic makes us uneasy has caused too many of us to avert our eyes. But what if child sexual abuse were a …

Child sexual abuse (CSA) involving sexual contact between an adult (usually male) and a child has been reported by 20% of women and 5 to 10% of men worldwide (1–3). Surveys likely underestimate prevalence because of underreporting and memory failure (4–6). Although official reports have declined somewhat in the United States over the past decade (7), close to 90% of sexual abuse cases are never reported to the authorities (8).