From the 1980s, responding to child sexual abuse within the family came to be seen as a core responsibility for doctors, health visitors and mental health practitioners working in community settings in England and Wales. There is little evidence to suggest that much progress has been made since then in terms of preventing men from sexually abusing girls (and sometimes boys) in the family environment, or in intervening early to stop such sexual violence. Situated in the historiography of child welfare, this chapter explores why the potential of the community practitioner’s role in early intervention has been overlooked in social research, as well as in histories of child protection, medicine and the ‘helping professions.’ The chapter explores the influences that caused emerging ‘experts,’ professional bodies and the government to push community health practitioners to look for the signs of child sexual abuse in the families they served and to intervene. It sets out the central argument of the book, that beneath a surface acquiescence to early intervention in child sexual abuse and for reasons that are not all within their power to control, community health practitioners have been unwilling to get involved.