ABSTRACT
The rape and abuse of children within the family environment is defined by Horvath et al. (2014) as ‘... abuse perpetrated by a family member or that takes place within a family context or environment, whether or not by a family member’ (p. 9). This definition covers acts that are also variously known as incest or intrafamilial child sexual abuse. This is a type of sexual violence that is thought to be vastly under-reported to the police – in the 2011 study by Radford et al., more than one in three children (34 per cent) who had experienced sexual abuse through direct contact by an adult did not tell anyone about it. Even given this limitation, it is difficult to estimate the number of incidents of familial rape and other sexual offences reported to the police. The police do record sex offence crimes against children, but these figures are not broken down by perpetrator type.
