From today's Metro:
One in 20 secondary school children has been sexually abused, a charity is warning, amid fears that young victims could be driven to suicide without expert help.
There were 1,225 referrals to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to help children who had been sexually abused last year – four times as many in 2008-9. The number of under-tens seeking support shot up from 30 to 257, with some victims as young as four.
Now, the NSPCC is launching a major campaign called Rebuilding Childhoods, as it funds a huge expansion of critically important therapy... It is feared 60,000 children miss out on therapy every year and risk permanently scarring their futures, the NSPCC says.
Quite how they scale up from 1,225 to 60,000 is unclear.
Or indeed how they square this 60,000 figure with their rather more modest (and possibly realistic) estimates of five years ago. I'm aware that 'sexual abuse' is a broader category than 'rape' but according to this, half of all sexual abuse is rape:
It is the first time the Home Office has released such statistics because the ages of rape victims were recorded for the first time only in 2004-5. In that period, 974 girls aged under 13 and a further 3,006 under 16 were raped* in England and Wales, while 293 boys under 13 and 320 aged under 16 were raped. Only one in 15 assailants - a total of 303 - were found guilty in court. Senior police officers believe actual numbers of rapes may be far higher because many children do not report the crime...
The figures were obtained by the NSPCC, Britain's biggest children's charity, which will launch a campaign tomorrow with the slogan 'Don't Hide It' to urge young people to report sexual abuse to someone they trust rather than suffer in silence. Evidence collected by ChildLine, the 24-hour telephone advice service that recently merged with the NSPCC, shows that of the 8,637 young people who rang in last year about sexual abuse, 4,414 - just over half - said they had been raped.
Of Course They Did
4 hours ago
5 comments:
While admittedly not even bothering with the wearisome task of tracing down where they might have got this figure from, you have to bear in mind that "sexually abused" would include incidents like a 15 year old girl having her bottom felt. More than likely the suspicious "secondary school children" probably means they're including all the way up to 18 as a child, as is the current vogue. It'll collect all sorts of apples and oranges together.
And it's just a made up number anyway, probably.
IanB, it's worse than that, according to their own figures, they were contacted 8,000 times in 2005 and 1,200 times in 2010. That, superficially, looks like a massive fall to me.
Strangly, I can't find anything about this particular campaign on the NSPCC's website. But it seems to be purely a campaign to get more people into therapy, thus turning an unpleasant experience they might get over, or even a minor experience they might shrug off, into a debilitating lifelong psychological scar.
We used to covenant money to the NSPCC but stopped when we realised that it had become a nasty political campaigning organisation with despotic tendencies. God rot it! How is the job it was set up for to be done now?
Mark, that is why they are resorting to making up figures and scaremongering. They can see their supply of the taxpayers' finest being throttled back and where would all their comfy salaries and convenient soapboxes be then?
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