Please note this podcast contains mention of child sexual abuse.
In 2015, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse was set up to investigate where institutions failed to protect children in their care. The inquiry's final report, published in October 2022, laid out a set of powerful recommendations to address past failings and protect future generations of children from abuse.
Recommendations for Change is a five-part podcast series from NSPCC Learning examining why these recommendations are needed, how they'll work if implemented, and what impact they will have on the prevention of child sexual abuse. Episode two: the Importance of Data.
Gathering and analysing data plays a key role in understanding the extent of child sexual abuse and exploitation. The IICSA final report suggests one of the reasons that the true scale of child sexual abuse in the UK is not fully understood is poor data collection. The report describes the available data as presenting a, quote, "confused and confusing picture".
There is "no consistent approach to the recording of data, including by key statutory agencies such as the police and local authorities" And without this clear data, it is hard to effectively prevent and respond to abuse. The final IICSA recommendations seek to remedy these shortcomings by suggesting the creation of a single core data set, and it's this recommendation that we'll be exploring in more detail in this podcast.
To begin, it's important to consider what the existing data and evidence is telling us about the scale of child sexual abuse in the UK. I put this question to Lisa McCrindle, Assistant Director for Policy, Communications and Strategic Influence at the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse, the CSA Centre.
The headline statement to remember is that far more children are sexually abused than we're currently identifying. So we estimate from survey data — and it's a range of different robust survey data — that indicates to us that more than 1 in 10 children will be sexually abused by the age of 16. That percentage is much higher for girls than boys, so 15% of girls and 5% of boys. There is likely to be some underreporting within the boys there, but also likely to be overall more abuse
of girls in that context. But, as a general, kind of, headline: more than 1 in 10 children by the age of 16 would experience some form of sexual abuse. So that's really important to remember. What's really important to remember is that the vast majority of those children, their harm won't be identified in childhood and they won't necessarily be able to tell anybody.
We need to move away from this expectation that children will tell us and will be able to tell us — there are so many barriers that prevent them from doing that — and we as professionals across a whole range of sectors need to be more proactive in identifying our concerns and responding to them. So what we do see from the data available to us is that pretty much every year around half a million children will be sexually abused in England and Wales.
So it's a huge number of children that are experiencing this harm each year. And what we're identifying is a really small proportion; we refer to it as the tip of the iceberg in terms of the children that come to the attention of services. Of that half a million children, around 2,700 children will end up on a child protection plan for sexual abuse in England and Wales. In England, about 50,000 children will be assessed as at risk of sexual abuse.
And then in England and Wales, about 100,000 children... well offences will be recorded that are child sexual abuse offences. So really, across all the measures, we're identifying far less than that that is actually happening. Although far more children are being sexually abused than we're identifying, we do know that sexual abuse is just as common as other forms of childhood abuse.
So the survey, again, survey data shows us that we have really similar levels of child abuse across emotional abuse, physical abuse and sexual abuse. And yet in terms of identifying that and responding to it through plans and assessments, sexual abuse is really, really low in comparison to that. And we need to ask ourselves why is that? What we do know is it's not because there's less of it, it's because we're
identifying less of it. And what are the barriers that are preventing professionals from doing that? In the last year's data, we did start to see a slight increase in the number of assessments of children being at risk, for child sexual abuse. So perhaps we're seeing, I guess what we might see is kind of green shoots from all the efforts to continually talk about child sexual abuse and focus on child sexual abuse, starting to see that come through in more
assessments. So there are indications that we can make that progress. And what we see from other areas is that where professionals feel confident, where they have the training, where they recognise that their locality expects these numbers to go up and recognises that we should be finding more of these children, and responding to more sexual abuse, And where we know that there are services available to support those children and their families, we do see an increase in identification
of concerns. So what we do know is that talking about this, supporting professionals, providing services, means that we are getting— we can get better at identifying and responding to children that have been sexually abused. I think the other really key thing to say about what do we know about the scale of child sexual abuse is it varies in terms of our response. So, our response varies massively across the country.
So, where you live really does matter in terms of whether your locality, whether that's children services or whether it's criminal justice, is likely to be identifying and responding to child sexual abuse. So again, that consistency of experiences is really important, and what we need to look at as services is how do we get better consistency in identifying and responding to child sexual abuse.
You've highlighted there the level of insights that we can already get from the data. How can this data be used by professionals to improve the response to child sexual abuse?
When we're talking about this to strategic leaders in localities, to managers and to frontline service professionals, is what this data should help us to do is to ask questions of our services. It should help us to ask questions around, well, would we expect this number to be higher or lower? Has this number increased or decreased? And why do we think that has happened? Did we do something or stop doing
something? So have we got better at our training and are we seeing that result in better identification? Have we stopped delivering a service and that's meant that we're not in contact with particular groups of children? Are we seeing some children identified more than other children? And therefore, do we need to look at what our training is telling us about identifying and meeting the needs of particular groups of children?
So really, I think the data is so important because it gives us a sense of how well are we identifying and responding to children that have been sexually abused. But then it should be pushing us to ask more questions. So what do we and don't we know as a result of this data and where could we find more information out? At the CSA Centre we publish every year a trends in data update. So, we look at the latest data and what those trends are
telling us. That's the available public data that's available nationally. Local areas and local agencies can dig into their own data and do much more analysis and and really unpick. They could do a data audit and they could do a snapshot and pull out some files and really start to unpick and understand their data. So while it might sound a little dry, it's incredibly important to helping us understand the experience of
victims and survivors. Survey data tells us about who is being harmed, what context is that harm happening in, at what age are children being harmed and whether they had a response or not to that? But then, service response data is telling us about how are we actively picking up and responding to this. And so I think data is incredibly important in helping us understand and respond to child sexual abuse and it should be driving us to ask questions and make better decisions.
And thinking about services for victims and survivors. The IICSA report says "public agencies rely on accurate and detailed data to make the best strategic and operational responses for the protection of children." What does the current landscape of support services look like in the UK, and how can we use data to improve the availability of these services?
The response that we provide to child sexual abuse, it doesn't fall within one particular service's responsibility or one particular agency. It's not just the responsibility of criminal justice. It's not just the responsibility of social work or health. Victims of child sexual abuse need help from a whole range of different places, and that help will change that they need.
So, the support that victims and survivors might need, and their families might need, if they've been sexually abused will be dependent on what's going on for them at the time, how old are they, what the arrangements are around, you know, if they're children, if they're being removed from the family or if they're able to stay with family members. But what impact is all of this happening?
Are they going through criminal justice processes that will require a different support service to maybe if they, you know, are perhaps moving forward and getting older and maybe experiencing adolescence or their first relationships or moving into adulthood, perhaps having their first personal relationships or serious relationships, maybe even going on to have their own children.
All of these things will present different needs at different times during the lifetime of somebody that has experienced and been sexually abused. It's really important that we understand that services aren't a single thing. There isn't one service that one agency can commission that is going to solve the response that victims and survivors need.
So I think that's a really important thing for us to understand: that services aren't homogenous, and our need for services will vary and differ over a victim and survivors' lifetime. In terms of the current landscape, what's been really difficult is that all these services will need to be delivered by different agencies — so criminal justice agencies might fund and commission independent, sexual violence advisors or victim support services for criminal
justice processes. We also need really good mental health support for children and that would be commissioned by the health teams. And we also need social workers that are trained and responsive and understand the different context of child sexual abuse. So all of these different services come from different places. So it's really difficult for us to look at, well, where all these services and what's available? And obviously all of those are commissioned differently across the
country. That sounds like you're letting it off and it's just really difficult and hard to do, but, that doesn't mean that
that needs to be the case. And I think there are organisations and there are individuals who have responsibility for making sure that these services are available and what we really need to see — and there are opportunities to do this in upcoming legislation — is how do we build in those expectations and duties to deliver services and make sure that there is the breadth of service available, but also, how do we make sure that we hold people to account on those duties?
So there are key strategic leaders and strategic organisations that have responsibility for commissioning those core services, whether that's through integrated care boards or through police and crime commissioners. But how are we setting expectations that a locality will ensure there is a breadth of services that meets the needs of victims and survivors in their locality, and that those services are being delivered and are accessible to those children and their families.
So there's key bits to that — it's a big question really — like what are the services we need? Well, actually they're wide and varied. They need to meet the needs of children, they need to meet the needs of adults, and they need to meet the needs of the families of children as well, because we know that supporting families is one of the key things we can do to best support children that have been sexually abused.
But then we need to make sure those services are there and we need to make sure that there is accountability on delivering those services. So, more broadly, thinking about the current landscape, some work was done a number of years ago to try and map what the current landscape of services was. Recently, the CSA Centre has been undertaking an update of that work, so we've been working to to map what we do
know about services. And in coming months we'll be publishing that work, which I think will be incredibly valuable, valuable to us in terms of what do we know about the current service provision, be really valuable to commissioners in terms of understanding where there is maybe more service offer and where there is less service offer, what types of services are we delivering more of in which we're delivering less of?
And that piece of research is available on the CSA Centre's website, and we'll put a link in the podcast show notes. Let's turn our attention now to the data recommendation proposed by IICSA. Recommendation one of the IICSA final report proposes the creation of a single core data set covering both England and Wales to improve data being collected by children's social care and criminal justice agencies concerning child sexual abuse and child sexual exploitation.
The recommendation suggests that these agencies produce consistent and compatible data, which includes the characteristics of victims and alleged abusers such as age, sex and ethnicity, and factors that make victims more vulnerable to abuse or exploitation. It should also say where the child sexual abuse and exploitation happened and the context in which it happened.
To learn more about how IICSA's recommendation would improve public agencies' approach to data collection, I spoke to Kelly Agudelo.
Hello, I'm Kelly Agudelo. I am Head of Analysis within the Vulnerability Knowledge Practice Program, VKPP. The VKPP are a body or organisation which tries to improve the policing response of vulnerability. We also have responsibility for national analysis of child sexual abuse and exploitation.
I began by asking Kelly how data collection currently works within the police force.
So since 2015, policing has had a network of regional child sexual abuse and exploitation analysts, and this comprises of one analyst per policing region and we have ten policing regions across England and Wales. And the role of that network is to provide the analysis on child sexual abuse and exploitation on a regional level, which then feeds into a national picture so that we can understand actually what is going on within CSA/E across England
and Wales. So that's actually been in existence for eight years now. Over the past few years we've been working towards achieving that single core data set or what we call the 'totality of police recorded child sexual abuse and exploitation crimes'. We produce on a quarterly basis, an analytical document looking at the scale and nature of police recorded child sexual abuse and exploitation across England and Wales.
And that allows us to identify, as I say, the scale of child sexual abuse that's being reported and the nature of it.
So breaking things down, like, the type of child sexual abuse and exploitation, who our victim survivors are, who the perpetrators are, and also looking at things like how recent the offending has taken place and how quickly victims are to report or not so how recent the offending is, and breaking down the demographics of victims and perpetrators across different types of child sexual abuse and exploitation because it does differ slightly. So that is the kind of data that we collect.
How might we be able to use that data to respond to CSA?
Data is a really important and valuable asset in terms of prevention and enforcement, and I think it's really important for all statutory organisations, and also non-statutory organisations, to understand the value of the information that they may hold when, actually, when you put it all together, it gives us a really good picture of what the problem is. And this is the case for all types of crime, but never more so than for CSA.
And we can use that data as analysts to understand actually where is offending taking place that's potentially being reported or if we get information from partners that doesn't relate to a crime where there is indication that there might be offending taking place in a particular location, which gives policing the opportunity to maybe target that location and prevent offending.
We ask for information around who our victim and survivors are to identify repeat victims, or potentially identify victims who may be at risk of child sexual abuse and exploitation. We also look at perpetrator information to understand, actually, do we have perpetrators that are cropping up across multiple locations, across multiple victims, so who are quite predatory in nature?
We use perpetrator information to understand where we might have enforcement opportunities, or opportunities where we can be a bit more proactive around disrupting those offenders from a policing perspective, and therefore trying to remove the harm that they pose to our children. We also look at information relating to the kinds of child sexual abuse that is
happening. So, for example, breaking it down to child-on-child or familial, and so on, to understand, actually, is that threat picture changing? What are we seeing more of? Do we need to focus our activity to kind of reflect where those trends are
happening? So if we know, for example — and this is just an example — that, child sexual abuse is mostly happening within the child-on-child context, actually, that's a very different enforcement or preventative tactic as opposed to if, for example, you have adult-on-child sexual offending.
And from a different perspective, in terms of that work with partners as well, it's really important to use the data to understand, actually, are there any opportunities to develop bespoke prevention or support services which reflect what's going on in the communities locally? So from that local level as well, it's really important to collect the data and to do the analysis on the data — that should be driving a lot of the policing activity.
So in terms of the importance of data capture, the data should be giving us — across statutory organisations, but specifically for me, from a policing perspective — that is the foundation on which we understand a problem and what is going on. And if we don't have the entirety of a dataset, if we've got patches in our data, we are missing parts of that picture and we can't therefore ensure that our response collectively as statutory organisations reflects what's seen in that picture accurately.
So it has real consequences in terms of us being able to develop an accurate response to prevent child sexual abuse and exploitation. So it's really important in that respect as well.
So that's why the IICSA recommendation of the single core dataset needs to be implemented: because it will ensure that picture is complete and strategic responses to CSA are being based on accurate evidence. Kelly, how do we make sure that data being gathered is accurate?
This is a long term issue, unfortunately, with policing data, and I'm sure it's the same for other statutory organisations as well. So we know that we've got aspects of data which are much more challenging. I should have said at the beginning that we are due to have an annual, publicly available report on the scale and nature of child sexual abuse, which is due to come out this autumn, so that will be publicly available.
There will be information within that report which details, actually, where we have patches in our data. But, as an example, we know we've got challenges in our data in relation to — and this is referenced in the report as well — the recording of gender, ethnicity and age. So actually us being able to comment on actually who are the victims and survivors who are potentially most at risk, for example, it makes it really hard to to comment with a degree of accuracy.
In terms of perpetrators, we also have challenges with our data in relation to ethnicity, gender and age. So being able to accurately understand who perpetrators are is a challenge for us. We are working to improve our data quality, so there is lots of work going on within policing to make sure that police officers, when they are capturing that information, that they are able to do that with a degree of accuracy. And that includes making sure that our crime recording systems allow this.
We also understand that there are challenges sometimes for the officers taking report, where they may not want to retraumatise the victim, or actually the focus is not actually on obtaining particular details for the victim at that point, but it's around ensuring that they get them to a place of safety and safeguarding that victim. So there are challenges in that respect in terms of the priorities for the officer taking details of the crime report.
This all has a knock-on impact in terms of the ability of analysts pull that information and make inferences on the basis of that data. So really important in terms of making sure that data is accurate not only from the perspective of understanding that national picture, but actually making sure that victims are seen in our data in a way that they are represented. So we know, for example, that there are particular communities that are underrepresented within our data.
And we don't want that. We want them to be visible. We want to understand actually how is CSA/E impacting victims of particular communities.
And that report that Kelly mentioned in our conversation, the National Analysis of Police Recording Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation Crimes report, was published in January 2024. The report uses data collected from 42 police forces to provide insight into the scale and nature of CSA and CSA offending across England and Wales in 2022, including crime types where these crimes were committed and the profiles of both victims and perpetrators.
To conclude, I asked Kelly how close we are to achieving the one core dataset outlined in the IICSA final report.
So, within policing, we have a policing core dataset, which we are working towards and have been working on for the past few years. But we know that the policing picture is just the tip of the iceberg. We know that there's a large amount of underreporting in this area. So there is a lot of work to be done in terms of how we link in with partner agencies to understand what's being reported in to them that hasn't come in to policing. There's lots of work needed in that
respect. I think it's really important for other statutory organisations, and other organisations generally, to understand the value of soft information — or intelligence, as we call it within
policing. So it may not be that there is a tangible offence that they've identified, for example, but there may be some concerns; but actually it's really important for them to feed that into policing, within the intelligence routes across their local force, because what it does, if you get bits and pieces of information and intelligence, it builds up a picture for the analysts within that force to understand, actually, we've had information from this person about this person or network.
And if you layer that with other information that might be coming in, that's really valuable. So I just want to stress that it's not just about reporting crime. Obviously, we want to make sure that we improve and increase, the way that child sexual abuse is recorded and reported. But actually, it's all the soft information that sits behind this. So, for example, this suspicious vehicle or I know that this person is using a particular method to groom children. All of that is really valuable.
So I just would urge professionals to think beyond a crime report, but actually all of the soft intelligence that they might be aware of that they don't understand has huge value.
In our conversation, Kelly explained the importance of avoiding gaps in the data. I asked Lisa McCrindle what data we are currently lacking that would improve our understanding of child sexual abuse.
What we don't have is a regular prevalence survey. So we don't have a regular survey that asks detailed questions about the experience of sexual abuse that people have experienced. We get our data presently... The best source of the data is from the regular crime survey for England and Wales updates, but inevitably that suppresses some reporting because it's framed as a crime and lots of people won't necessarily feel confident to name what happened to them necessarily as a
crime. The most detailed data we have and that we draw on consistently is the NSPCC survey that was undertaken in 2009. That was a wider child maltreatment survey, so it asked some questions about sexual abuse but didn't go into detail. So what we really, really need, and what would be a great investment in improving our data, would be a regular prevalence survey on child sexual abuse. And when I say regular, we're not calling for it every year, we're talking about could it be every five years?
Could it be every ten years? This would be a massive improvement on the current data that we currently have. And then in terms of service data, there's lots that can be done. There's huge amounts of information that's collected by services that isn't necessarily collected in a format that can be extracted and analysed. But there are things that could be done to improve individual agencies' data and their capacity to compare that data with different agencies in their locality.
If there was one thing that we would put on a data wishlist, if you like, it would be to improve our understanding about the relationship between the victim and the person that has abused them. So that's often missing from data. If we could get that understanding about the relationship between the victim and the person that's abused them, that would give us huge insights into the context of that harm that's happening, which would enable us to think about prioritisation and response.
I wanted to end with one final incredibly important point from Lisa.
Data is data, and it's really important to remember that all of those numbers are children. They're individual children who have experienced sexual abuse, who somebody has sexually harmed them. And I think it's really important that when we are looking at those numbers, we do remember that.
Thanks to Lisa McCrindle and Kelly Agudelo. You can find links to all the reports mentioned in this episode, including the latest edition of the CSA Centre's Trends in Data report, in the podcast show notes. In the next episode of Recommendations for Change, we'll be focusing on children in care. What does the IICSA final report suggest we do to better protect vulnerable looked after children?
If you've been affected by any of the issues raised in this podcast, you can reach out to the NSPCC Helpline for support, call 0808 800 5000 or email help@nspcc.org.uk. This podcast series was produced in Autumn 2023. All information was correct at the time of recording, but the world of child protection is ever-changing. To stay up to date, visit the NSPCC learning website at nspcc.org.uk/learning.