In my nearly 20 years of talking to fellow priests about safeguarding and child sex abuse, one statistic stands out. It is not the number of children affected, priests I have talked to or Roman Catholic meetings and conferences I have addressed. It is the number of responses I get to my standard request to my clergy audiences: raise your hand if you have never had a meaningful conversation about how to deal with child sex abuse. Without exception, in every group every priest raises a hand. For the great majority of Roman Catholic priests, and most likely for clergy of other faiths as well, child sex abuse is simply taboo, a difficult conversation best avoided – Lawrence Shulman’s ‘invisible sign’ seems to hang on the walls of our churches.