‘Acting on behalf of the children’ in the Cleveland Inquiry: ethical methodologies for researching and writing histories of sexual violence

Although child sexual abuse is now recognised as widespread and pernicious, children are marginalised in the archives and within the existing historiography on sexual violence. Recovering their voices presents acute practical, ethical and moral challenges for historians, who often allude to ‘reading against the grain’ but rarely describe how this is achieved. In this article we use sociological methods usually reserved for the present to foreground the discursive mechanisms that peripheralised children from the 1987 Cleveland Inquiry to highlight the fraught status of children in research on sexual violence more generally.