Child sexual abuse

A recurring theme in the literature on child sexual abuse is the paucity of treatment outcome studies and it has been highlighted by a number of authors that more progress has been made in the investigation than the treatment of childhood sexual abuse (e.g. Faller, 1993). Much more work is needed on prevention and therapeutic interventions for victims; however, the age-old problem remains 'how to motivate clinicians in the field to actually use theoretically sound and supported treatments?' (Saunders et al, 2004, p.7). There is some evidence that abuse-specific treatment programmes are more successful than generic therapy (Gomes-Schwartz et al, 1990), and it is clear that effective interventions require early intervention and coordinated responses from different agencies (Bagley and King, 1990). Certainly considerable effort is needed to ensure that the possibility raised by Berliner and Conte (1995) does not become a reality: 'There's speculation about the possibility that intervention may be more distressing than the abuse itself, or at least that it may exacerbate the negative impact of the abuse experience' (p.372).