ABSTRACT
This is not simply a progression over time. It is not that all is in order because we have reached stage 5, now that sexual abuse is much higher up the child protection agenda. Sometimes the basics aren’t carried out correctly. Many people still retreat into denial. It happens much less often these days, but headteachers still occasionally tell me that they do not need to know about child protection because ‘we don’t have that sort of family in our school’. I do not share or respect their confidence. We know only what we are allowed to know, or are clever enough to discover, and I suspect we will only ever know about a minority of the abuse that children suffer. It is, by definition, a covert activity that is hard to detect. Research among adults would suggest that they did not receive, or necessarily seek, protection at the time, even from within the present system. Many factors will be significant in both understanding abuse and our effectiveness in responding to it.
