Identifying Mother-Son Incest: What Child Protective Services Investigators and Attorneys Need to Know.

Abstract

Society’s disdain and concern for child sexual abuse has been accelerated by the recent trial of Jerry Sandusky and a number of other local high profile cases. To address this phenomenon, every state has an infrastructure of professionals to detect, investigate, record and analyze allegations of child abuse.

Twenty-five years ago, the United States Supreme Court observed that “child abuse is one of the most difficult crimes to detect and prosecute, in large part because there often are no witnesses except the victim.” Pennsylvania v. Ritchie, 480 U.S. 39, 60 (1987). This observation particularly characterizes a unique form of child abuse: mother-son incest.