'It would be better for the newspapers to call a spade a spade': The British press and child sexual abuse, c. 1918-90

This article provides the first rigorous survey of coverage in the twentieth-century British press of what we now call ‘child sexual abuse’. It argues that abuse was always visible, but its place on the press agenda changed significantly. After 1918, coverage was mainly restricted to brief, euphemistic reports of court proceedings. During the 1950s and 1960s, reporting became more explicit, but abuse was repeatedly conflated with ‘homosexuality’ or other ‘deviancy’. Only from the mid 1970s was ‘child abuse’ conceptualized as a distinctive ‘social problem’, and it became a key issue in press debates about permissiveness and social change. Even as abuse hit the headlines, however, we can see that the press’s attention was restricted to certain manifestations of it, and the cultures sustaining it were not properly interrogated.