They can be cured only by a revolution in the workplace to take the pressure off harassed parents, and by large-scale community-based programmes to empower the poor.Social affairs is a notoriously difficult arena. Often the statistics comparing then and now do not exist or, if they do, are open to a range of interpretations. Even so, dialectics like Freely's usually rely on a solid argument based, in part at least, on indisputable facts.This is where The Parent Trap falls down. Freely has pretty much abandoned data, preferring instead to concentrate on newspaper coverage of the crisis in the family She sees the media as all-powerful.

Its accounts have dominated the debate with a distorted picture that has robbed individual parents of confidence.For anyone who takes a daily newspaper, the inevitable re-telling of old stories that this approach entails is as tedious as being cornered by that party bore And the analysis just is not sharp enough. For example, Freely insists that the contrasting cases of Diane Blood and Mandy Allwood persuaded many people in this country that "our government is allowing... the wrong people to have children, while actively obstructing those who should be having them instead."When it comes to fertility treatment, our anxiety is often the one Prince Charles identified when he spoke about GM crops: we feel a deep unease that we are meddling with the sacred. But nature has always allowed "the wrong people" to have children.Where interesting ideas crop up, they dangle undeveloped. Freely examines what she calls the cast of stock characters employed by the media to explore family problems Among them is the paedophile. She argues that "we owe our present level of anxiety to years of campaigning by social action groups" but, frustratingly, no more is said.

The impression is of a rough first draft.There is also an extraordinary claim that it is "now perhaps too easy" to secure a conviction in cases involving child abuse. Freely declares that "this is the only crime for which there is no need for corroborative evidence".Child sex abuse is like any sex offence in that it takes place in private. As with allegations of rape, where there is an absence of physical evidence juries must decide who is telling the truth. In cases involving children, only a tiny percentage of complaints end with a conviction. This has actually changed very little in the past 20 years.The rare moments where some solid research does intrude are so enlightening that the reader longs for more.