The healthy, normal emotionally resilient child will learn to accommodate to the reality of continuing sexual abuse.
"[1] Summit described how he claimed that children try to resolve the experience of sexual abuse in relation to the effects of disclosure in real life.
He posited five stages:[2] Summit himself recognized in later articles the extent to which many persons were misled by the use of the term "syndrome" and how his theory had been used inappropriately as a diagnostic method for both behavioural sciences and criminal trials.
[3] According to Mary de Young, CSAAS was invoked often during the day-care sex-abuse hysteria of the 1980s and 1990s, because it purports to explain both delayed disclosures and withdrawals of false allegation of child sexual abuse.
[4] Several states have prohibited testimony regarding CSAAS, based on evidence that it is not accepted generally by scientists, except for delayed reporting.