The scale and nature of child sexual abuse: Review of evidence

Omschrijving

This report brings together the latest evidence from surveys and official agency records to set out what is and is not known about the scale and nature of child sexual abuse (CSA) in England and Wales. Its purpose is to collate this evidence into a single report which can inform the development of CSA prevention, disruption and identification activities. It also highlights the remaining gaps in evidence, and makes recommendations about how to improve the collection of data on CSA.

The first edition of the report was published as a scoping exercise in 2017, with the aim of reaching the best estimate of the scale of CSA in all its forms in England and Wales and describing what was known of its nature. This edition updates this evidence base up to March 2020, the latest date for which national data is available. It therefore does not cover the possible impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the prevalence and nature of CSA and on agencies’ ability to identify and respond to it, which will take many years to become fully measurable.

This review relies on two sources of information: self-report surveys that attempt to measure the prevalence of CSA in the population, and the number of CSA cases identified and recorded by the different agencies working to address the abuse. 

What we know from prevalence studies
The scale of child sexual abuse Surveys asking participants about their experiences of CSA differ in how they define sexual abuse, and whom and how they ask about it.
The two major surveys conducted in England and Wales have reached very different estimates of how many children experience CSA: the NSPCC child maltreatment study undertaken in 2009 found that 24.1% of adult participants described experiences of some form of CSA; but only 7.5% of respondents to the latest childhood abuse module (2019) within the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) reported experiences of CSA. There were some key differences in how the surveys were conducted:
‣ While the CSEW module asked questions about maltreatment that occurred before the age of 16, the NSPCC asked about these experiences up to the age of 18. International studies have shown that prevalence of almost every kind of sexual abuse – by adults, peers, family, acquaintances, and strangers – increases with age between 15 and 17, which was not captured in the CSEW.
‣ While the NSPCC child maltreatment study was a dedicated survey on child abuse, the CSEW module asked questions about abuse at the end of a survey on crime. Crime-focused surveys have been found to generate lower prevalence estimates than those framed in terms of health, wellbeing or sexual experience, as people are less likely to disclose experiences of CSA in the context of criminal activity.
‣ While the CSEW module asked adults aged 18–74 to report retrospectively about their experiences of childhood abuse, the NSPCC surveyed only children and young adults in order to measure the more recent prevalence of abuse. studies for England and Wales, the data suggests that at least 15% of girls/young women and 5% of boys/young men experience some form of sexual abuse before the age of 16, including abuse by adults and under-18s.

The nature of child sexual abuse

‣ Penetrative abuse appears significantly less prevalent than other forms of CSA, but is more likely to be repeated. The NSPCC child maltreatment study found that 4.5% of young people aged 18–24 had been sexually assaulted by another child and 3.5% by an adult. In the CSEW childhood abuse module, 2% of participants reported experiences of rape or penetrative abuse in childhood, by another child or an adult; over two-thirds of them reported that this had happened more than once. The experiences of other forms of CSA were reported more frequently in the CSEW childhood abuse module: 5.8% of participants described non-penetrative contact abuse, and 3.4% non-contact sexual abuse.

‣ In surveys, girls are at least three times as likely as boys to describe experiences of CSA.

‣ Some children and young people appear much more likely to be sexually abused than the wider population: in the CSEW childhood abuse module, disabled participants were twice as likely as non-disabled participants to describe experiences of CSA; those who had lived in a care home were nearly four times as likely to have experienced CSA than those who had not; and those who had experienced childhood neglect were five times as likely to have also experienced CSA as those who had not.

‣ The vast majority of perpetrators are male: among respondents to the CSEW childhood abuse module who described being sexually abused in childhood, 92% said it had been perpetrated by males only, and 4% by both males and females. The NSPCC child maltreatment survey, too, found that most perpetrators were male and known to the child in some way.