The stability of child abuse reports: a longitudinal study of the reporting behaviour of young adults

Abstract

There was substantial unreliability in the reporting of child abuse. This unreliability arose because those who were subject to abuse often provided false negative reports. The consequences of errors in reports appear to be: (a) that estimates of abuse prevalence based on a single report are likely to seriously underestimate the true prevalence of abuse; while (b) estimates of the relative risk of psychiatric adjustment problems conditional on abuse appear to be robust to the effects of reporting errors.