An Unthinkable Crime: The Silent Epidemic of Sexual Abuse and a New Age of Reckoning

by Janelle Nanos

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

“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 but it also explains, in no uncertain terms, how this has happened.”—Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road

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 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

384 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication January 26, 2027

About the author

Janelle Nanos is a reporter at The Boston Globe, a MacDowell fellow, and a visiting fellow in journalism at Boston College’s Institute for the Liberal Arts. Her decade-long investigation into Kate Price’s allegations of organized abuse was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and among the Globe’s most-read stories of the year. Her reporting has also appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, and more. She lives in Boston with her husband and two children.

Reviews

[Britta · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

This book was incredible in its depth, its audacity, its timeliness, and its heart. The writing was both academic and straightforward, so I’d say even a pedestrian reader could absolutely glean the takeaways.

I enjoyed the authors ability to chose to focus on the stories of Kate, Adira, and several others as good representative stories, fully encompassing the spectrum of ways children can be abused whether it’s trafficking, familial sexual abuse, or perpetrated by strangers.

Something could be said for how much other this book could have gone into exploring the myriad ways sexual abuse is exacerbated by marginalized groups beyond economic factors (namely by race and geography) BUT this does not take away from the absolute punch this novel brings into painting a full picture of the history and pervasiveness of sexual abuse in America.

I will recommend this book to EVERYBODY. Thank you to the author for this amazing work.