The authors integrate research on social marginality, intersectionality, and cultural psychology to understand how marginalized social experience accentuates South Asian immigrants' desire to construct a positive self-identity. Using model minority ideology as an example of such a construction, we highlight its role in silencing the topic of child sexual abuse within this immigrant community as well as its impact on attitudes towards professional mental health services. The authors contend that their framework, the idealized cultural identities model on help-seeking and child sexual abuse, provides a unique analytical model for clinicians and researchers to understand how South Asian Americans process, experience, and react to child sexual abuse. (Published Abstract)