Sexual Abuse, the Cleveland Affair and the Private Family

Abstract

Well in advance of the publication of the Carlile and Henry Reports in December 1987, a new and quite different child abuse scandal exploded into the public domain. The Cleveland affair, as it has often been called, represented quite different anxieties. If previous inquiries demonstrated that welfare professionals, particularly social workers, failed to protect the lives and interests of children and intervened too little too late into the private family, the concerns focused around Cleveland seemed to demonstrate that professionals, this time paediatricians as well as social workers, failed to recognise the rights of parents and intervened too soon and in a too heavy-handed way into the family. While this was to prove the major theme running throughout Cleveland, it also touched a range of other personal and political sensitivities related to sexuality, intimacy, gender and professional power and knowledge. For the first time, the concerns were articulated via sexual abuse.