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An Unthinkable Crime

The Silent Epidemic of Sexual Abuse and a New Age of Reckoning

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An Unthinkable Crime

By: Janelle Nanos
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Summary

A sweeping, ground-breaking account of how child sexual abuse has been systematically concealed and minimised for decades – and how a courageous group of survivors, psychologists and advocates are fighting to expose the truth.

One in five girls. One in seven boys. That is the devasting global estimate of how many children experience sexual abuse. But how did we get here?

In An Unthinkable Crime, Pulitzer Prize finalist Janelle Nanos traces how a professional culture of disbelief has flourished for generations. Child sexual abuse was treated as 'unthinkable' - a crime so taboo it was dismissed, ignored or blamed on its victims.

This 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. It also deals with the new challenges and powerful counter-tools available in the age of AI. In looking away, we’ve allowed this crime to fester and proliferate. It’s time to face this hidden epidemic head on.

© Janelle Nanos 2027 (P) Penguin Audio 2027

 Abuse Child Abuse Dysfunctional Families Parenting & Families Relationships Sexual Abuse & Harassment Social Sciences

Critic Reviews

A gripping, wide-ranging investigation into surviving what for most of us is unmanageable horror, but that is all too real for millions of girls and boys around the world who have been sexually abused and trafficked. What makes this disturbing book so readable and hopeful are the vivid accounts of real human beings whose courage, persistence and acceptance of support helped them to recover. An Unthinkable Crime is a true page-turner (Bessel van der Kolk, author of THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE)
Written with sensitivity and a reporter’s instincts, this book will shake you up. How we talk about what happens to one in three American girls doesn’t just matter for social justice — it matters for how scholars, politicians, and police alike think about what it means to protect women from the very start (Cat Bohannon, author of EVE)
Essential reading. A rigorous, deeply human account of why survivors haven’t been believed — and what it takes to change that. This book matters (Nadia Murad, Nobel Prize-winning author of THE LAST GIRL)
An inspiring, enraging and deeply clarifying journalistic work, An Unthinkable Crime not only dares to look closely at something our society has willfully ignored for generations; it also explains, in no uncertain terms, how this has happened — and offers three deeply moving stories of people who have lived through the worst consequences of that denial and refused to stay silent any longer (Robert Kolker, author of HIDDEN VALLEY ROAD)
A book of stupendous scholarship that shows how a band of defiant academics, psychologists, activists, law enforcement officials, and uncommonly brave victims slowly revised history, rendering visible a sickening problem — child sexual abuse — that was as endemic as it was ignored. Janelle Nanos has produced a definitive work, a story that’s ultimately about validation, vindication, and reclamation. What an achievement. What a gift (Jennifer Senior, Pulitzer Prize–winning Atlantic writer and New York Times bestselling author)
An Unthinkable Crime is a staggering work of investigative history, tracing the vast reach of child sexual abuse and the intricate machinery of denial that has allowed it to flourish. With extraordinary care and narrative command, Janelle Nanos uncovers something far more troubling than ignorance: again and again, the evidence was there, and respectable people found ways to explain it away while the institutions charged with protecting children instead shielded perpetrators and discredited survivors. I finished this absorbing, fearless book with my understanding rearranged. This is journalism of the very highest order (Brian Goldstone, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of THERE IS NO PLACE FOR US)
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