Title: What Is a Social Problem?
Headings: 1.1
What Is a Social Problem?

1.1 What Is a Social Problem?
Learning Objectives
The Natural History of a Social Problem
Stage 1: Emergence and Claims Making
Stage 2: Legitimacy
Stage 3: Renewed Claims Making
Stage 4: Development of Alternative Strategies
Key Takeaways

Content: These acts of sexual violence against women have probably occurred from the beginning of humanity and certainly were very common in the United States before the 1970s. Although men were sometimes arrested and prosecuted for rape and sexual assault, sexual violence was otherwise ignored by legal policymakers and received little attention in college textbooks and the news media, and many people thought that rape and sexual assault were just something that happened (Allison & Wrightsman, 1993). Allison, J. A., & Wrightsman, L. S. (1993). Rape: The misunderstood crime. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Thus although sexual violence existed, it was not considered a social problem. When the contemporary women’s movement began in the late 1970s, it soon focused on rape and sexual assault as serious crimes and as manifestations of women’s inequality. Thanks to this focus, rape and sexual assault eventually entered the public consciousness, views of these crimes began to change, and legal policymakers began to give them more attention.