Obscene telephone calls to children: A retrospective field study

Studied a sample of 24 Danish children selected from a larger group of 56 c hildren who had received obscene telephone calls from a single adult offend er to ascertain the psychological consequences of this form of sexual abuse . The sample is unusual in that the source of the abuse was the same for al l of the children, and none of them had records of prior or concurrent abus e from other sources. Almost all children suffered significant psychologica l consequences from these calls, those who obeyed the caller's demands expe riencing more serious consequences than those who did not. A comparison was made with the consequences suffered by an additional group of 7 children w ho had experienced direct physical sexual abuse by the same offender.