Call for urgent study on child sex abuse
THE NSPCC has called for an urgent study to get a true picture on the scale of child sex abuse after more than three million adults across England and Wales said they were victims of historic exploitation.
One in 13 adults aged 18 to 74 years – 2.4 million women and 709,000 men – were victims of sexual abuse before the age of 16, data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has shown.
This includes rape or assault by penetration, including attempts; other contact sexual abuse, and non-contact sexual abuse.
The abuse was most likely to have been perpetrated by a friend or acquaintance, while around a third were sexually abused by a stranger.
The ONS has been working to produce a comprehensive picture of child abuse in the UK by incorporating questions into the Crime Survey for England and Wales and analysing this alongside other sources of data.
It found that overall, around one in five adults – 8.5 million – had experienced a form of child abuse which includes sexual and physical abuse, as well as neglect and emotional abuse – before they turned 16, but many cases remain hidden.
Andrew Fellowes, public affairs manager at the NSPCC, said: “This report shows how abuse blights thousands of childhoods around the country, and the devastating effects it can have into adulthood.
“But it is also clear from reading this that we simply do not know how many children are suffering right now, hampering our ability to plan and fund services to help them recover.
“It’s crucial government conducts a prevalence study so we get a true picture of the scale of abuse in the UK. Only then will we know what services are needed to protect and support abused young people.”
The statistics come as new figures also reveal a third of explicit images of children found online by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) are selfies. The watchdog took action over 124,605 images of child abuse found online between January and November 2019, of which 30 per cent, were self-generated. More than threequarters of these images featured children aged 11 to 13, most of whom were girls.
The IWF and charity Marie Collins Foundation, which supports survivors of abuse, are calling on young men who find images or videos on porn sites that they believe may be of underage victims, to anonymously report what they have found.
One 13-year-old victim was sexually assaulted in her home, a day after being groomed by a fake modelling scout online. Police contacted her months later after discovering images of the assault on her attacker’s computer.
She said: “If the images that I’d sent to the perpetrator that evening had been reported and I was identified, I could have been safeguarded before the man came to my house, and that would have prevented me from being sexually assaulted.”