ABSTRACT
Going public where the sexual abuse of a child is suspected or discovered combines many of the difficulties associated with help seeking for other family problems, together with the further complications added by secrecy and conflict within the family and stigma outside it. It is not only fears of prosecution of their partners or of losing their children into care if state agencies become involved (although these may be important factors) that prevent women seeking help. The reluctance of battered women to seek help for themselves reflects cultural ideals of family privacy and results from the sense of shame and guilt consequently involved in admitting to marital problems, pressure from the abusive husband to preserve privacy and expectations of the response of others (Dobash and Dobash, 1979). Battered women often do seek help or leave violent relationships ‘for the sake of the children’, and for women in the present study the abuse of the child sometimes gave a sense of entitlement to help that they had not felt in relation to their own experiences of violence.
