ABSTRACT
One of the first questions I am often asked is, how common is child sexual abuse? When, in 1982, in my first book on incest I gave the figure of one in ten females having been abused (mainly based on Finkelhor’s excellent studies) the shock/horror was almost universal, up-to-date workers in the field excepted. Even at the time of Cleveland (1987) MPs, doctors, moralists, were still able to express in the media their appalled horror at the behaviour of the beleaguered Cleveland doctors, virtually presenting them as perverted freaks. In fact, contrary to media myth, of the 121 cases of suspected c.s.a., only twenty-six were eventually judged by the courts to have been wrongly diagnosed (Campbell 1988).
