ABSTRACT
The mid-1990s provides a standpoint for placing child sexual abuse in perspective. It has presumably always been with us but, in the UK at least, fifteen years ago the topic had no place in public awareness. The earliest of the new wave of US studies (e.g. Finkelhor, 1979) were known to a few specialist professionals, yet social work departments typically did not list sexual abuse as a separate (or significant) category in their classification of child abuse cases; and it was well into the 1980s before the classification was at all widely used (e.g. Wild, 1986).
