| Abstract: | SUMMARY. In this personal view of recent developments, the author suggests that child psychiatrists were taken by surprise when they began receiving a rapid increase of referrals involving sexual abuse. Many saw their prime role as needing to adapt psychiatric techniques to determine whether abuse had occurred. Child sexual abuse was seen as being outside of normal psychiatric conditions. These responses led to major controversy within the profession. It is argued that the Cleveland Inquiry should now allow child psychiatrists to work with sexually abused children in a more traditional way, their main function being to assess and treat the whole child and its family and evaluate the significance of the abuse in a wider context |
