1It is a difficult thing to write about child sexual abuse. This is clear from both the source material discussed in Sexual Violence Against Children in Britain Since 1965: Trailing Abuse, but also from Nick Basannavar’s own reflections throughout its pages. To write about this form of violence, one must make a series of careful choices: moral choices, linguistic choices, choices about sensitivity and consideration of audience. This book provides us with a skilful example of how to negotiate these choices as a historian, as well as being a highly useful analysis of the factors that conditioned and shaped the choices of those representing instances of child sexual abuse in Britain from 1965. In Trailing Abuse, Basannavar provides a robust argument against previous binary conceptualisations of public discourse about this type of violence: the assumption of a transformation from silence and obscurity before the 1970s to candid discussion and outrage thereafter, and from societal ignorance to knowledge and awareness. He demonstrates instead that sexual violence against children has been consistently represented in some form, and that the lineage of these representations is complex—with tropes and language shifting and reversing borrowing and mutating across time and across cases.

2He achieves this through a case study approach, examining four major instances of child sexual abuse which hit the headlines in Britain between 1965 and the present. These cases—the Moors Murders of the mid-1960s, the forming of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) in the mid-1970s, the Cleveland child abuse crisis of 1987-88, and finally the posthumous revelations in the 2010s of Jimmy Savile’s decades of sexual abuse—allow for illustrative analysis of public discussions of child sexual abuse. Basannavar considers the specifics of each case at a local level alongside the broader societal shifts and debates that coloured their representations, carefully examining the social and cultural movements of the 1960s, perceived permissiveness and conservatism, and shifting concerns over children, the nuclear family and the state.  These chapters are foregrounded by an initial section which sets out some of the longer histories relating to definitions and conceptualisations of violence and attraction to children, as well as constructions of childhood and fears over strangers and sexualisation. This is an ambitious feat for a short space, with vast literatures and geographies to cover, but this section manages to provide a useful context to the themes which follow. Basannavar consistently draws on an impressive range of sources to discuss each of his case studies and, as such, builds on previous research on these events. However, it is the interlinking of these cases and the reflection of the period as a whole that is Basannavar’s richest contribution to our understanding of representations of child sexual abuse across time.

3In Basannavar’s first case study, he discusses the coded and indirect nature of the 1960s coverage of sexual detail within the Moors Murders trial, and the media’s characterisation of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley as inhuman and monstrous as a method of making sense of the violence. He then goes on to explain the emergence in the mid-1970s of the activist organisation PIE—which brought the term “paedophile” into popular consciousness—and demonstrates how this was met with a predominantly hostile response from the press, and was conceptually conflated with homosexuality. His third case study is his fullest, examining the crisis over accusations of child sexual abuse within families in Cleveland in the late 1980s and the subsequent demonisation of the experts involved. The Savile case is well-chosen as a closing case study as the source material relating to his career and his privileged position for abuse spanned the periodisation of this book. It also allows for reflection on Basannavar’s discussion of modern investigators’ perceptions of historic perpetration: “trailing and reconstructing the past through the subjectivities and values of the present,” resulting in a “conversation with the past” (p. 3).

4A major theme of Trailing Abuse is use of language. The book helps us understand the “codes, proxies and metonyms” (p. 88) that have been used to discuss sexual violence perpetrated against children, and Basannavar is careful to consider the role of anachronism and to avoid the use of modern conceptual tools to explain historical modes of portrayal and communication distinct from our own. In the Epilogue “Speaking” he reflects upon the redrafting of his own language to ward off reproducing the sensationalism of his sources, and this is indicative of the reflexivity of this work. Basannavar acknowledges his own positionality as an adult man writing about a form of violence mostly perpetrated on children by adult men, and his difficulty in encountering some of the sources during the research process. It is refreshing to read his candid report of gathering source material in the PIE archives, and it is a strength of this book that it communicates the unsettling, uncomfortable nature of doing this type of historical enquiry.

5In his recent article building on this book’s analysis of the Savile case, Basannavar has anticipated—and defended—a key point of contention in relation to his case study approach of major incidents as a way of investigating child sexual abuse narratives: that is, “further foregrounding the exceptional to the neglect of the everyday” (2023, p. 2). While his argument—that by addressing the exceptionalism surrounding perpetrator narratives, we are better able to deconstruct them—is certainly a valid one in relation to Savile, historians of violent acts should be wary of overfocus on the extraordinary. Most instances of sexual violence against children never garnered national coverage, and to write a more complete history of representations of child sexual abuse over these key decades, attention must be paid to the everyday coverage of child sexual abuse. Basannavar is certainly aware of this issue and while he does discuss a handful of contemporary “comparators” to the Moors Murders, more of this is required to form a fuller history of narratives of violence.

6This thoroughly interdisciplinary book is a major contribution to our understanding of how child sexual abuse has been publicly represented and responded to in the latter half of the twentieth century in Britain. This topic is a sensitive and urgent one: the last few years have seen the publishing of the report of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in 2022 and reporting mechanisms and support systems have been established for survivors of child sexual abuse from these decades. Basannavar draws on analogies of landscape and space as part of the book’s structure, and through this work he has acted as cartographer, helping us to map out the complex contours of language describing sexual violence against children so that we can better understand our current location.