‘Silenced Voices, Invisible Bodies’ explores what children and young people who have been sexually abused have had to say about their attempts to get help, particularly from community-based health practitioners such as doctors, health visitors and mental health practitioners. While most of this book deliberately centres health professionals’ experiences, exploring why, despite encouragement and training to be vigilant in relation to the physical and behavioural signs of sexual abuse, their rates of identification did not rise over time, this chapter uses a range of sources including memoir, letters to a national Inquiry and published reports to ascertain survivors’ views. What strategies did children take to protect themselves from abuse within the family, did they (or a non-abusing parent) try to seek help from a health professional and what sort of response did they get? The sources coalesce into a picture of deep dissatisfaction from adult survivors about the way health (and other) practitioners ignored their attempts to send out distress signals as children. This chapter therefore serves as the cornerstone for the examination of practitioners’ experiences that is the subject of the remainder of the book.