That's the tag line on the Australian repatriation story but I want to know - how can sexual abuse not be physical?

Perhaps it's virtual?

BTW, the world has gone mad.

Maybe it's to try and distinguish between a child beater and a child molestor...the former violent and the latter not violent. Certainly, those children of up to eighty years ago...what were they...orphans?...who were sent out to Australia to start "a new life" suffered both kinds, often at the same time.

But it happened in this country too, at the outbreak of World War Two, when hundreds of thousands of children were evacuated away from the big cities. I remember talking to an elderly man who has passed on now and who was telling me that as an eleven year old, he was evacuated from London to the wilds of the Staffordshire countryside. He was allocated to a middle aged man who lived on his own and, although I'd better not go into any detail here, once the man got him home, he lost no time in sexually molesting him. Imagine a sexually graphic version of "Goodnight, Mr Tom" that was refused a certificate by the BBFC and you'd more or less have it.

But it wasn't all like that. Most wartime evacuees had the time of their lives in their temporary adopted homes and most of the children sent to Australia landed up in good homes as well. But for many of them it was a terrible life of abuse; cruelty and neglect.