An Unthinkable Crime

A sweeping history of how child sexual abuse has been systematically concealed and minimized for decades—and how a courageous group of survivors, psychologists, and advocates are fighting to expose the truth

In 1896, Sigmund Freud presented a theory that he hoped would explain why so many of his female patients were suffering from “hysteria.” Many of them had experienced sexual abuse as children, largely at the hands of their fathers, and Freud had come to believe that this was at the root of their malady. But the idea was so terrible, and it implicated so many of the men in Freud’s Viennese social circle, that he eventually abandoned it.

In An Unthinkable Crime, Pulitzer Prize finalist Janelle Nanos shows how Freud’s denial reverberated for generations, fueling a professional culture of disbelief. Child sexual abuse was treated as “unthinkable”—a crime so taboo it was dismissed, ignored, or blamed on its victims. Then in the 1970s, a pioneering group of scholars and clinicians started to change the narrative. Nanos brings us inside the Harvard Trauma Study Group, where psychiatrists Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, and others met to discuss what they, like Freud, were seeing in their patients. Their fierce belief in victims’ stories of abuse sparked a backlash in the 1990s, as groups like the False Memory Syndrome Foundation began questioning the veracity of recovered memories. The pendulum swung again when the Catholic Church scandals revealed the scale of the crisis and showed the prevalence of organized abuse.

Artfully woven into this larger history are the testimonies of three survivors: Kate Price, Adira James, and Alicia Cohen. Nanos follows these women as they struggle for equilibrium, seek accountability, and deal with the devastating aftermath of their trauma.

This engrossing, deeply reported book is the first to bring together the stories of survivors with the inspiring work of psychologists, law enforcement officers, lawyers, and advocates who have been fighting on behalf of children for decades. Freud may have looked away, but they have not, and neither can we.