There is no question that public awareness and concern about child sexual abuse have increased in Australia in recent years. In Queensland, official statistics indicate that the rate of sexual offences reported to police doubled between 1994 and 1998 from about 92 per 100,000 to more than 190 per 100,000. The majority of these offences were committed against children younger than 16 years of age (Criminal Justice Commission, 1999). There is no clear evidence, however, that the incidence of child sexual abuse itself is increasing; rather, increased reporting rates appear partly to reflect a greater willingness by victims and others to report allegations of child sexual abuse. Indeed, many alleged child sexual offences are not reported until long after they have occurred. Nevertheless, there is widespread agreement that child sexual abuse is a major social problem. International efforts to understand the perpetration of child sexual abuse have been constrained by a number of important conceptual and methodological problems. First, there is a broad consensus among researchers that child sexual offending and child sexual offenders are heterogenous. That is, there is considerable variation both in the ways sexual offences against children are perpetrated (e.g., tactics employed to select and 'groom' children; sexual and other behaviours involved in the commission of offences; methods of avoiding detection), and in the characteristics of the perpetrators themselves (e.g., age; ethnicity; education; psychosocial and psychosexual background; level of sexual interest in children; relationship with victims; general criminality). Causal explanations are similarly varied, and although there are several established theoretical formulations (e.g., psychoanalytic; biological; behavioural), none enjoys the support of a strong empirical base. Perhaps in lieu of a clearer conceptual consensus, most researchers agree that sexual offending against children is a multi-dimensional and multi-determined phenomenon.