Child Sex Offence Every 20 Minutes
By Anthony France
MORE than 400 children are sexually abused every week in Britain — one every 20 MINUTES, a shock investigation has revealed. The NSPCC called for urgent action as figures showed nine out of ten paedophiles go unpunished. A child abuse expert last night said Britain has a massive paedophile problem — which should be treated like an outbreak of DISEASE. Jon Brown urged the Government to act as shocking figures obtained by the NSPCC showed perverts are lurking the length and breadth of the country. The 43 police forces in England and Wales recorded 23,097 child sex offences last year. That included rape, incest, child prostitution and pornography. The annual figure is equivalent to 444 attacks a week — or one kiddie abused every 20 minutes. Just as worryingly, only 2,135 of offences reported — ten per cent — led to someone actually being convicted and sentenced. Thousands of paedos escape scot-free. Mr Brown, head of the NSPCC's Sexual Abuse programme, said: "When you have a situation where more than 60 children are being sexually abused every day, something is very wrong. "The Government has to start treating the situation as seriously as they would if faced with an outbreak of chronic disease. "We also need a clearer picture of what is happening between an offence being reported and someone appearing in court. The police are doing their best to bring prosecutions but we need to understand why there is such a huge disparity between the figures. The fact there are repeat offences against some children also shows not all are one-off incidents." London's Metropolitan Police dealt with the most abuse cases, a total of 3,420. The Leveson Inquiry into Press standards has heard Scotland Yard has 150 cops working on its phone hacking investigation — and just 27 devoted to nailing paedophiles. London's Deputy Mayor Kit Malthouse also told the inquiry the Met's bill for probing phone hacking is forecast to hit £40million. In contrast, £36million is spent annually on investigating child abuse in the capital. Thames Valley Police, covering Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire, had the second highest child abuse figures, with 1,264 offences. Last month the force smashed an alleged child sex ring in the university city of Oxford. It is claimed 24 victims — some as young as 11 — were groomed, drugged and raped over a period of six years. Six men aged 26 to 37 are remanded in custody awaiting trial. A former officer with Thames Valley Police was jailed for 18 years in January for a campaign of sex abuse described by a judge as "one of the most despicable cases" he had heard. Mohammed Younas, 43, of High Wycombe, Bucks, was convicted by a jury of 15 counts of rape of a girl over the course of eight years, from when she was seven years old. Aylesbury Crown Court heard Younas, whose father was a colonel in the Pakistani Army, would rape his victim every other day at the height of the abuse. In another case involving Thames Valley, pervert David Cox was jailed for two years in February for breaching a Sexual Offences Prevention Order. He was being monitored by the force after being banned from unsupervised contact with children by a court in Sussex. But he attended services at St Ebbe's Church, Oxford, where he mingled with children, including a vulnerable young girl. He was only caught when a support worker at the hostel where he was living caught him downloading extreme pornography. West Yorks was third in the police figures of child abuse cases, with 1,170 allegations. It was followed by Hampshire, which had 1,148. More than 1,470 of the national total were aged five and under, 4,973 were ten to five and 14,819 were between 11 and 17. Six times as many girls (19,790) were abused as boys (3,218), the NSPCC said. The figures released yesterday show a small drop from 2010, when a total 23,390 offences were recorded. But the NSPCC's Mr Brown said: "A concentrated effort has to be made if we are to start reducing this distressing level of offences, many of which are committed on extremely young and helpless children. "The NSPCC is doing what it can by using information like this from the police to tailor our treatment services. We are also pioneering new programmes, including our Schools Service, which aims to work with 1.8million kids aged seven to 11 over the next four years. "But we can't tackle this problem by ourselves. "It requires a major effort from government and the public to give children the protection they need and to provide more therapeutic programmes — so the young victims of abuse can start to rebuild their lives."
|
.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.