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Nearly 40,000 child sexual abuse offences were committed by children in the space of a year, a new report has found. Analysis of data from 44 police forces in England and Wales found that in total 115,489 crimes linked to child sexual abuse and exploitation were recorded in 2023. The crimes they committed included 22,821 offences that involved physical contact, 58% of the total, while 16,067, or 41%, involved indecent images.
Assistant Chief Constable Becky Riggs, who is the UK policing lead for child protection, said unfettered access to the internet has partly fuelled the trend of young people abusing other children. She said: “If unfiltered, if those safeguards are not put in place from a parental control measure, they’ve got access to information on the internet unlike we could have ever imagined a decade ago. “I do think technology has played a part in it.
” Gareth Edwards, director of the Vulnerability Knowledge and Practice Programme (VKPP) that produced the report, said a combination of factors came into play, including the behaviour of peers, home and school environment as well as content viewed online. He also said it can be challenging for children to understand the concept of consent in different contexts. A similar proportion of offenders in child sexual abuse and exploitation cases were aged 10 to 17 in 2022.
A VKPP report from that year suggested historically around a third of child sexual abuse had been carried out by children, but that the proportion has since risen. In the latest report looking at 2023 data, researchers analysed 375 sample cases involving children, and found four out of five offences involving indecent images of children were due to self-generated images. Of these cases, around one third were classed as non-aggravated, meaning the person took and shared the images willingly, while the remainder involved aggravating factors such as coercion or blackmail.
Changes are due to be brought in that would mean a child involved in a non-aggravated case would be classed as an “involved person” rather than a suspect. The report found that on social media, Snapchat was the app most commonly used by young people to share images, partly because they are supposed to disappear. Pictures shared on the app can be snapshotted and saved permanently, but the report said this should be blocked in the same way as on banking apps.
Instagram was the second most commonly used app, particularly by abusers who want to blackmail victims because they can access their follower list and threaten to share pictures. Most victims of child sexual exploitation and abuse are female, however the picture is very different when it comes to financially motivated sexual extortion – commonly referred to as sextortion. For these offences, 90% of victims are boys aged 14 to 17.
It is estimated that about 500,000 children are sexually abused each year, and that many crimes are not reported or identified. Ms Riggs said the total number of offences is “horrific and shocking”. She said: “It’s easy for society to look away from these types of crime because they are abhorrent types of crime.
“Society will struggle to acknowledge that these types of crime occur in our world.”.
