I am the Director of Crimes against Children Research Center, Co-Director of the Family Research Laboratory, Professor of Sociology, and University Professor, at the University of New Hampshire. I have been studying the problems of child victimization, child maltreatment and family violence since 1977. I am best known for my conceptual and empirical work on the problem of child sexual abuse, reflected in publications such as Sourcebook on Child Sexual Abuse (Sage, 1986) and Nursery Crimes (Sage, 1988). I have also written about child homicide, missing and abducted children, children exposed to domestic and peer violence, commercial sexual exploitation and internet victimization.
I am the co-founder of several large national data collection efforts including the National Survey of Children Exposed to Violence (NatSCEV) and the National Incidence Study of Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Thrownaway CHildren (NISMART).
In my recent work, for example, my book, Child Victimization (Oxford University Press, 2008), I have tried to unify and integrate knowledge about all the diverse forms of child victimization in a field I have termed Developmental Victimology. This book received the Daniel Schneider Child Welfare Book of the Year award in 2009. Altogether, I am editor and author of 12 books and over 250 journal articles and book chapters.
I have received grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, and the US Department of Justice, and a variety of other sources.
