An Unthinkable Crime

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

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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 three girls. One in nine boys. That is the devasting estimate of how many children experience sexual abuse – 90 per cent of the time at the hands of someone they know. For decades, starting with Freud, child sexual abuse has been deemed ‘unthinkable’, too awful to be widespread. But in looking away, we’ve allowed it to fester and proliferate. It’s time to face this hidden epidemic head on.

This engrossing, empathetic, 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. It also deals with the new challenges and powerful counter-tools available in the age of AI. Freud may have looked away, but Janelle Nanos and her sources have not – and neither should we.

Riveting, maddening, and nearly impossible to put down, this searing history of the sexual abuse of children goes beyond the suffering to show how and why the prevalence of these heinous behaviors has been hidden for far too long. At times, readers may think they are devouring a true-crime thriller — that’s how expertly Janelle Nanos unspools the narrative. As the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators continue to go mostly unpunished, this is the book the world needs right now
Amy Wallace, co-author of NOBODY'S GIRL

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

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

An astonishing, trenchant, and deeply reported labor of love, An Unthinkable Crime forces us to reconcile two apparently incompatible truths: many of us find it impossibly difficult to contemplate childhood sexual abuse; yet the crime is extremely common, befalling one in three girls and one in nine boys. Janelle Nanos shows us exactly how this is possible: we have looked away and enabled networks of abuse to operate and entrench themselves, to the detriment of children everywhere. Bold, brilliant, and devastating
Professor Kate Manne, author of ENTITLED

Child sexual abuse profoundly harms its victims at a time when they are most vulnerable to lasting effects. Janelle Nanos’s compelling and comprehensive look into the cultural response to this abuse underscores the systemic project of denial that, at every step, has obstructed and suppressed survivors’ brave fight to be heard. These survivors are made to bear the brunt of society’s inability to grapple with this issue. Nanos, admirably, refuses to look away
Roxanna Asgarian, author of WE WERE ONCE A FAMILY

About Janelle Nanos

Janelle Nanos is a reporter at the Boston Globe, a MacDowell fellow, a Pulitzer-prize finalist 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 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.

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