Sexual Assault Trials Handbook — The dynamics of child sexual abuse

R McElvaney and M Culhane, “A retrospective analysis of children’s assessment reports: what helps children tell?” (2017) 26(2) Child Abuse Review 103.

In this study, retrospective analysis of children’s file data was evaluated as a method of gathering information about children’s experiences of informal disclosure of child sexual abuse. The files were from children professionally evaluated as having provided a credible account of abuse. The strengths and limitations of this method are identified by comparing findings from the files with findings from a small sub-sample of children who were interviewed, and it is suggested that further exploration with a larger sample size would be worthwhile.