6 between the plaintiff and the defendant’s experts. She compiled a report in which she set out the factual information derived during the consultations, described the development of post-traumatic stress disorder and so-called traumagenic states in child-abuse survivors, identified the characteristics of such a condition and matched it to the idiosyncrasies displayed by the plaintiff as a child and in her adult years up to the time that she instituted action against the defendant. She recognised that the plaintiff had always been aware of the fact that the defendant had abused her between the ages of 6 and fifteen years. It was her opinion that the plaintiff’s realisation that the defendant was responsible for the abuse was a gradual process which probably commenced in late 1996 and that she could not be said to have acquired knowledge that it was not she but the defendant who was responsible until some time in 1997. Ms Fredman referred to published learning on the subject of child abuse and its effects on survivors and particularly to ‘The Traumatic Impact of Child Sexual Abuse: A Conceptualization’, by David Finkelhor and Angela Browne of the Family Violence Research Programme of the University of New Hampshire, Durham, published in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry in October 1985, and to Trauma and Recovery, The aftermath of violence - from domestic abuse to political terror, (Ch 5, ‘Child Abuse’), by Judith Lewis Herman, New York, 1992. [10] Finkelhor and Browne analyze sexual abuse in terms of four trauma-inducing factors (‘traumagenic dynamics’) – traumatic sexualization, betrayal, powerlessness and stigmatization. All of these distort a child’s cognitive and emotional relationship with the world. Traumatic sexualization is a process in which a child’s sexuality is