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For the first time, many children were being cared for by relative strangers outside of the home.

As awareness grew around child sexual abuse, suspicion began to land on those tasked with providing childcare.

Over time, this anxiety resulted in a moral panic that became known as daycare sex abuse hysteria.

It led to criminal investigations and trials in the United States, England, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where daycare providers were accused of committing extensive sexual abuse.

These cases often began with one parent's concerns and grew as a kind of contagion swept through a community.

A fear that abuse might be missed led to child protection workers and law enforcement officers treating initial suspicions as potentially massive conspiracies.

Although there have been cases of childcare workers sexually abusing children, cases that fell under the umbrella of daycare sex abuse hysteria were often marked by a lack of physical evidence, an incredibly large number of victims that only began to disclose under repeated questioning and pressure, and typically featured bizarre, implausible scenarios.

Because child abuse was still becoming understood, investigators hadn't honed their interview techniques when it came to potential victims.

In several cases, children were interviewed many times over months, with interviewers sometimes asking leading or forced answer questions.

Children who eventually confirmed abuse were rewarded with praise and attention, while those who said nothing had happened often weren't believed.

Instead, they were questioned over and over, being pressured to disclose.

Moreover, the panic that spread through a community when rumours of abuse took hold was known to cause what was called contamination in interviews.

Children's answers could be influenced by conversations they'd had with their parents, friends, or that they'd overheard.

Research later showed that the interviewing styles used in many of the daycare sex abuse hysteria cases could increase false reports, distort memory, encourage children to guess, and create narrative escalations where a story grew increasingly wild.

Developmental psychologists have found that young children are highly suggestible, especially under repeated questioning by authority figures.

Cambridge University professor Michael Lamb, an expert on interviewing child abuse victims, has said that while children can be competent witnesses, they are susceptible to making errors during interviews when they infer that an interviewer is looking for a particular answer.

Sometimes they want to help but can't understand the questions they are being asked.

They can also become confused about the source of their memories for particular events.

Interviewers during the 1980s and early 1990s also made use of anatomically correct dolls, which children could use to demonstrate abuse that they might struggle to describe verbally.

These dolls were used in the Christchurch Civic Crash case.