Child sexual abuse, real and unreal. (Society).

BY DEFINITION abuse is a bad thing, and sexual abuse of the young is particularly loathsome. However, misinformation, deliberate or unintended, about its incidence makes bad situations worse rather than better. Miriam Saphira's 1985 claim that "almost half the girls" in New Zealand had been sexually abused, or the estimate for Australia of 28 per cent by Goldman and Goldman in 1988, might lead us to fear that depravity is so extensive that little can be done about it.

Exaggeration arises from two main sources: acceptance of phone-ins and other unreliable claims as actual evidence, and use of slippery definitions. The Adelaide Rape Crisis Centre was a prime abuser of "phone-ins". One of its phony phone-ins was rewarded by massive funding by the then ALP government, in order to combat the incest allegedly suffered by one female in every four. The Rape Crisis Centre accepted every claim made by phone as true without investigation and defined incest as "any explicit sexual behaviour that an adult imposes on a child under the age of seventeen". It admitted that "by strict legal definition, incest in South Australia is sexual intercourse between a parent and child or a brother and sister. South Australian law does not recognise other relationships as incestuous." Nor did the law of any other Australian state, but numerous politicians and journalists were fooled by its ludicrous claims.

Wendy Patton and Mary Mannison of the School of Learning and Development of Queensland University of Technology noted in 1996 that some surveys of child sexual abuse included "harassment (e.g. catcalls, whistling)" within their totals of offences. In 1988 Judith Cashmore and Kay Bussey of Macquarie University included in child sexual abuse "any sexual act directed towards a child, from intercourse to unwanted kissing or fondling clothed parts of the body". Babies and very small children find it difficult to object to "unwanted kissing", perhaps by elderly hirsute relatives, but such acts, if recalled by children in later years, were included by Cashmore and Bussey in their sexual abuse statistics. Cashmore and Bussey classified as child sexual abuse all uninvited sexual advances by persons eighteen or over to persons under eighteen, including passes made by eighteen-year-old males at seventeen-year-old females.

In four separate studies in the 1980s, Di Vasto et al, James, Mims and Chang, and Sedley and Brooks, tried to meet criticisms of failure to distinguish between more and less serious types of child sexual abuse by arguing that it is "inappropriate" to try to erect a hierarchy of child abuse based on "seriousness". Di Vasto et al asserted that non-invasive incidents, such as obscene phone calls and exposure, are as stressful as rape.

It is very common for people engaged in research to exaggerate the magnitude of whatever problem they are confronting. Sometimes the explanation is greed for extra funding, sometimes an altruistic desire to alert public opinion to a real cause for alarm, but deceit is never justifiable. Even more dangerous than exaggeration of overall incidence of child sexual abuse is improper targeting of some groups as prime agents of child sexual abuse. And activists sometimes change targets very rapidly. During the 1980s many researchers, mainly female, into child sexual abuse, were convinced that males within families were the main source of child abuse. The main public targets today are clergy and teachers in church schools.

During the 1980s researchers made war on the notion …