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2 J. Forensic Psychiatry & Psych. 1 (1991)

handle is hein.journals/jnlofncpy2 and id is 1 raw text is: EDITORIAL Child sex abuse allegations: informing the public KEITH SOOTHILL Over the past few years there has been a quite remarkable development of interest in child abuse. Moving from the earlier focus on baby battering to the current concerns of child sexual abuse in its multiplicity of forms, the public must itself feel battered by the impact of the various messages which are being transmitted by the media in this increasingly problematic area. The media are undoubtedly crucial in the development of moral panics as Stan Cohen (1972) showed in his seminal work, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, a couple of decades ago, investigating how the Mods and Rockers in the mid-I960s were transformed by the attention of the media into new 'folk-devils'. In the 1970s, 'new' kinds of deviance were identified. So, for example, baby-battering, wife-battering, even granny-bashing, had their media coverage, but one suspects that the 'newness' of these activities is more just a feature of their becoming noticed for the first time. From the mid-1980s child sex abuse has become a recurrent theme of media attention. While there is little doubt that a focus on a specific activity, particularly by the media, can have the outcome of changing the phenomenon, another part of this process is that people tend to adopt the logic of the media which in turn affects their definitions of reality. Hence, what is happening in the media is crucial to understanding how the public is informed. We have recently completed a major study on the reporting of sex crime in the newspapers. One of our tasks was to consider the shifts in press reporting since the Second World War. It can, of course, be readily recognized that serious sexual assaults of females and sex murders involving children often attract considerable newspaper coverage, particularly at the search stage for the perpetrators. However, by the mid-1980s even prior to the Cleveland inquiry into alleged sexual abuse of children, child sex abuse had already become the other major discussion topic relating to sex crime. It was sustained almost

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