Child victims of sexual abuse.

This chapter provides a snapshot of the vast body of research available about the assessment of child victims of sexual abuse. For almost every technique or approach there exist conflicting studies demonstrating its strengths and weaknesses. The Cleveland child abuse inquiry highlighted the dangers and difficulties of an uncoordinated protection system (Bagley and King, 1990) and since then considerable work has been done make the systems more effective and child friendly. However, if children's trauma and distress is to be eradicated from the assessment process there is still a lot of progress to be made.