conducted in the next few weeks.

And the spokesman for a prominent child abuse prevention group has thrown her suport behind the study of all the Island's fifth year secondary school students.

Lawyer Mr. Saul Froomkin, the head of the Child Abuse Task Force, said the survey will be conducted in the next two or three weeks.

He said the task force was trying to ascertain the incidence of child abuse on the Island and "this is one way to get a handle on it''.

Child abuse groups have had difficulty gauging the level of abuse due to duplication of statistics and the reluctance of victims to report incidents.

Coalition for the Protection of Children spokesman Mrs. Sheelagh Cooper, welcomed the plan.

"The idea of a victims survey is excellent. But it is of course very difficult to do and you have to make use of a lot of expertise to elicit true and honest responses.'' She said she hoped the task force had been able to get "good advice'' from other jurisdictions to ensure the data was reliable.

She said the Coalition had conducted its own victims survey about six months ago in conjunction with students from the Bermuda College and that survey had shown an estimated one quarter of households in Bermuda had been affected in some way by physical or sexual abuse.

But she cautioned that that survey was been based on a random sample and could not therefore be considered scientific. Its findings had also been dependent on how the students themselves defined abuse.