Home Office announces new strategy to combat child sexual abuse
Fiona Simpson
Friday, January 22, 2021
The Home Office has announced a new national strategy aimed at protecting children from all forms of sexual abuse.
The Tackling Child Sexual Abuse Strategy sets out how the government will use new legislation and enhanced technology to stop offenders including investing in the UK’s Child Abuse Image Database to identify and catch more offenders more quickly.
Investment will allow for the development of new tools to speed up police investigations and protect officers’ wellbeing by avoiding them being repeatedly exposed to indecent images, the Home Office said.
Plans have also been announced to review Sarah’s Law - introduced following the murder of Sarah Payne in 2000 - to make it easier for parents and carers to ask police if someone has a criminal record for child sexual offences.
The government has also vowed to support local areas to improve their response to exploitation by funding the The Children’s Society’s Prevention Programme initiative, and will introduce the new Online Safety Bill to ensure that technology companies are held to account for harmful content on their sites, and do not compromise on children’s safety.
New research by the Home Office estimates that the social and economic cost of child sexual abuse over a victims’ lifetime
Home Office research estimates that the social and economic cost of the crime over the victims' lifetimes was at £10 billion for children who experienced child sexual abuse in the year ending March 2019.
The strategy also aims to improve the data that is available on offenders following the publication of the paper on the characteristics of group-based offending which found that it was difficult to draw conclusions about the ethnicity of offenders as existing research is limited and data collection is poor.
The paper demonstrates the difficulty in drawing conclusions about the characteristics of offenders leading the government to commit to improving improving its understanding of child sexual abuse - including around ethnicity.
Home Secretary Priti Patel said: “Victims and survivors of child sexual abuse have told me how they feel let down by the state. I am determined to put this right.
“This first-of-its-kind national Strategy will tackle and respond to all forms of child sexual abuse, relentlessly going after abusers, whilst better protecting victims and survivors.
“Crucially, it contains a commitment to collect higher quality data on the characteristics of offenders, so that the government can build a fuller picture of perpetrators, and tackle the abuse that has blighted many towns and cities across our country.”
Welcoming the publication of the strategy, Mark Russell, chief executive of The Children’s Society, said: “We warmly welcome the announcement of renewed funding for our national orevention programme, which works with professionals and communities to help them prevent and tackle child abuse and exploitation - for instance through training to spot the warning signs and identify children who need help earlier.
“This strategy is a golden opportunity to improve support for child victims of horrific crimes and send a clear signal that child sexual abuse and exploitation are crimes that will not be tolerated.
“That is more important than ever right now as successive lockdowns have left many children increasingly vulnerable and isolated, with worrying increases in instances of online child abuse and children coming to serious harm. The focus upon tackling abuse online as well as offline is crucial.
