Jim Christie (“When theology trumps psychology”, 15 February) is right to ask when sexual abuse of children came to be “identified as a crime against children”, that is, as a public rather than a private problem. I was a child-care lawyer between 1983 and 1988, taking children into the care of the local authority. The first sexual-abuse cases I came across were in about 1985. I attended a workshop at this time for social workers and the police, exploring among other things what kind of language children would use to describe what had happened to them. So at least by the mid 1980s, but possibly not much before that, sexual abuse of children was beginning to surface in the UK as something which those in authority should deal with promptly. It is quite possible that b