The scale of the national and international problem which societies face in combating child sexual abuse has been increasingly suggested during the 1990s. Disturbing clues of what still remains to be uncovered have provided, as Roland Summit says in his moving paper Hidden victims: Hidden pain', ยฏeeting glimpses of the reality brought by each brief clearing of the fog' (Summit, 1988).
They include recovered memories by numerous adults of sadistic abuse; repeated paedophile ring scandals in the residential childcare sector; revelations of sadistic child murder; a massive international industry in child pornography; investigations into widespread international `sex tourism'; and the existence of ritual abuse by cults who use hitherto unimagined physical, sexual and emotional torture and mind control.
New technology, such as the video recorder and the Internet, has both encouraged and revealed alarming levels of child sexual exploitation. For instance, in November 1996, Fr Adrian McLeish, a Newcastle-upon-Tyne priest, was convicted after international police monitoring of the Internet identiยฎed him as one of an international ring of 37 paedophiles. He had more than 8 000 photographs of children on his computer system.
Yet despite greatly heightened public and professional awareness, despite vast amounts of research, good practice guidelines and individual case investigations, a massive task remains in reducing the actual incidence of sexual abuse, and in formulating eective prevention strategies. The remarks of the National Commission of Inquiry into Prevention of Child Abuse about public inquiries are equally apposite to research and ocial guidelines: `Despite a series of wideranging, well-publicised and expensive inquiries . . . over the past 20 years, and despite a ยฏow of recommendations deriving from these inquiries, the abuses that gave rise to these reports persist, largely unaected by such eorts as have been made to prevent them' (National Commission, 1996).