Obscene telephone calls to children: a retrospective field study.

Studied a sample of 24 Danish children selected from a larger group of 56 children who had received obscene telephone calls from a single adult offender 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 all of the children, and none of them had records of prior or concurrent abuse from other sources. Almost all children suffered significant psychological consequences from these calls, those who obeyed the caller's demands experiencing more serious consequences than those who did not. A comparison was made with the consequences suffered by an additional group of 7 children who had experienced direct physical sexual abuse by the same offender.