Protecting children from violence and sexual abuse

The attack on young girls and the adults who tried to protect them at Southport a fortnight ago has generated fears about children’s safety. These exceedingly rare but apparently random attacks are difficult to understand.

The extreme right has conflated the girls’ deaths with the sexual exploitation and grooming of girls by Asian men and accuses immigrants, primarily Muslim men, of being largely responsible for sexual offenses against women and children. They maintain that, in rioting, they are seeking to ‘protect’ ‘their’ women and children from immigrant sexual predators.

In this article I explore how best to understand the risks children face and what can be done to reduce them. I will not be discussing the children in Southport as to do so could be prejudicial to police enquiries and a fair trial.

Child murder

In the year ending at the end of March 2023, 48 children under 16 were killed in the UK. Some 28 were under 11 and almost all were murdered by their parent or main carer. Twenty were aged between five and 15, most of whom were teenagers murdered by other teenagers with a knife.

In subverting our most protective instincts, killing children is used as a terror or vengeance tactic or in war, as demonstrated by Russian and Israeli forces today. Children are an easy target as they are often herded together in large numbers and the places in which they assemble are easily identifiable and well known.

The worst mass killing the UK has ever experienced was in March 1996 when (white) British Thomas Hamilton killed 16 pupils and one teacher and injured 15 others at a school in Dunblane. In 1981, 13 black teenagers were killed in an arson attack at New Cross in London. The attack was believed to be racially motivated but no one was ever charged with the deaths.

There have also been ‘serial’ killers of children: for example, Fred and Rosemary West between 1967 and 1987, and Lucy Letby in 2015 and 2016. There are no indications that ethnicity was relevant in the choice of victims or the offenders’ motivations. The common themes in most attacks on children are their vulnerability, offender motivation to harm, and opportunity.

Child sexual abuse

Child sexual abuse is largely hidden and undetected and it is difficult to know its extent. Annual estimates by the NSPCC suggest that one in 20 children will have experienced (contact) sexual abuse by the time they are 18. Girls are three times more likely to be sexually abused than boys.

In England, in the year 2022 to 2023, 59,502 offenses of child sexual abuse were reported to the police, a rate of 66.3 per 10,000 children, and a third of all reported sexual offenses were against children. Some 90% of children sexually abused were abused by someone they knew and a third of the sexual abuse of children is by other children (police reporting figures – see below – suggest it is now over 50%). The ethnicity of the perpetrator and victim reflects the familial and social groups with whom they are in contact and are broadly in line with their proportions in the community; most sex offenders (90%) are white.

Sexual exploitation and grooming

In the same year, 17,000 cases of child sexual exploitation (grooming) were recorded in England and Wales and 1,100 children were trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation (most trafficking for sexual exploitation occurs within, rather than to, the UK). Ethnicity data published on sexual exploitation and grooming is patchy and unreliable. It is also, now, quite old. In 2017, Full Fact published a summary of the data and its problems. We do know most (36%) ‘group’ offenders were white in 2011, but Asian men (27%) were, then, disproportionately represented in the criminal statistics. 14% were of ‘unknown’ ethnicity.

Key indicators of risk of ‘group’ sexual abuse are victim vulnerability and men’s social or work networks. In UK cities this often centers on the nighttime economy – fast food and taxi services and the composition of those involved reflected the ethnicity of those working in those sectors.

In wealthier groups, the composition of offenders also reflects the main participants’ social circle. For example, Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘grooming gang’ appeared to be (from the small amount of information published) largely powerful, wealthy, white men part of an international party circuit.

Other large-scale abuse of children in schools, the churches and in children’s homes have been almost all by white men, but this reflects the demography of the country during the period in which the abuse occurred. The victim’s youth is not the determining factor among most of those who have sex with teenagers but rather availability/vulnerability and group social dynamics.

Up until this century ‘grooming gangs’ were almost all white men which reflected the male population of the country at the time. They were almost never prosecuted, or even identified as such, and the prevailing view was that their victims were ‘prostitutes’ or their sexual activities were a ‘lifestyle choice’. In the mid-1970s working in a hostel for 16 to 18-year-old girls, I found the police refused to act against the (100% white) men that congregated every night outside on the basis that ‘our’ girls must be ‘ encouraging them’.

The public outcry against men sexually exploiting vulnerable girls, particularly girls in care, only erupted when it became apparent that some perpetrators were Asian. The girls were recast as victims, much in the same way as the British girls who were trafficked to Brussels and Paris for prostitution in the ‘white slave trade’ in the 19th century, rather than being forced into prostitution in the UK. It was only then that action was taken against child prostitution and the age of consent was raised from 13 to 16 in 1885. Then as now, a proprietorial attitude about ‘our’ girls against ‘foreigners’ overlooked men’s abuse for decades.

Child deaths and sexual abuse trends

Child deaths are relatively uncommon in the UK and have been reducing over the centuries. The global mortality rate for children under 15 is 4.3%, plummeting from about 48% at the start of the 20th century (and the thousands of years previously). In the 19th century the death of children from poverty, abandonment or abuse and neglect was commonplace.

Few children will die from these causes today and parents need no longer fear child death in infantry. While deaths from road accidents remain the biggest cause of child deaths, 512 children died on the roads in 2021, they too are reducing, primarily due to speed restrictions, drink driving laws and better in-car safety for children.

In 2023, there were over 50,000 ‘knife enabled’ offenses in the UK and, of 590 homicides over the course of the year, 43% were caused by knives. According to a House of Commons report, England and Wales is experiencing a national ‘epidemic’ of knife crime. That only 10 children under 16 died from knife attacks in 2023 is testament to the developments in emergency health services (rather than reductions in knife crime).

In 2022, 107,000 child sexual abuse and exploitation offenses were reported to the police, a 400% increase over 10 years. Three quarters are in-person offences, the remainder being internet offences. The sexual abuse of children by adults has remained broadly stable for several years but child-on-child abuse has risen from about a third to over half (52%) of police recorded offenses. Family (33%) remains the most likely perpetrators. Group-based offending (grooming ‘gangs’) amounts to just 5%, most of which is image sharing. Perpetrators are overwhelmingly male (82%) and victims overwhelmingly female (79%).

Impact of the far-right and racism

In the West there is a strong association between far-right ideology, especially antisemitism, and misogyny and violence against women. Misogynist social media is often a ‘gateway’ to other extremist interests. Violence against women is used as a form of extreme right-wing terrorism and misogyny is often the ‘glue’ between overlapping right-wing ideologies. In the UK Elizabeth Pearson, the counter-terrorism expert, found far-right violence on the streets coalescing with ‘toxic’ masculinity and far-right ideology to ‘protect’ women and children while being oppressors at home.

School shootings have been committed by both adults and children, but mostly young people. The profile of young school shooters is male (90%) and white (61%). Those studied feel marginalized and ‘stupid’ and over half have mental health problems. Many are preoccupied with violence, particularly the Columbine shootings, and Hitler or Satanism.

The European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research has published several articles on the phenomena of a youth online subculture around school shootings and on TikTok (to which UK young people have access) and their impact on events. While these shooters share youthful profiles similar to white supremacists, their targets are rarely chosen on the basis of race.

Racism causes chronic stress in children and severe impacts on their mental health. It can stunt a child’s development. Racism experienced by parents also impacts severely on children’s mental health and sense of security. Institutional racism that impacts on housing, employment and access to health care will exacerbate children’s poor health, such as occurred in the Windrush scandal. At its most extreme, racial violence kills children: for example, Stephen Lawrence and Damilola Taylor.

Protecting women and girls

Children are much safer from premature death or abuse than they were in the past. Women and girls are primarily at risk of sexual and physical assault from their families, friends and classmates. Children and young people pose the greatest risk to other children. Often their propensity for violence is evident long before a serious attack. Signs are too frequently ignored.

Ethnicity is not an indicator of risk of either committing or being a victim of sexual abuse, nor is it a good indicator of mass attacks on children when committed by other children.

Adherence to white supremacist ideology is a strong indicator of physical risk (and some sexual risk) to women and, although white supremacists are not particularly likely to target children, their attacks on public places of worship, institutions or organizations will pose a risk to children relative to their presence in these places. This is also true for other extremist violence, including that committed by Islamicists. While men are most likely to be perpetrators against women, women form a significant minority of the online white supremacist community.

In the UK and other white-dominant countries, children of color are at much greater risk of physical abuse than their white counterparts, both from other children and adults, and are particularly at risk from ‘random’ acts of street racist violence. Everyday racism is a serious form of child abuse.

Those that would harm women and children are often open about their misogyny and racism. For example, Lucy Connolly from Northampton, who has been arrested for inciting violence towards asylum seekers, tweeted: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels, full of the bastards for all I care”. Dismissing or ignoring such posts as ‘in frustration’ or ‘freedom of speech’ is to ignore the warning signs of that individual’s potential for violence. They are clear warning signs. Parents and professionals should be alert to these warning signs and seek help/advice when they see them, and no parent or professional should be castigated for ‘over-reacting’ when raising concerns.

Preventing child physical and sexual abuse requires working in schools and in youth groups, tackling online grooming, incitement, racism, poor mental health and bullying. Parents need to be more aware of what their children are doing and with whom they associate, not just to protect their children but also to protect other children from them.

Greater controls may be needed on the selling of weapons, access to the internet or social media, and to the spreading of information.

White parents, focusing on the behavior of immigrants or Muslims, are willfully ignoring the real risks their children face and increasing the risks to other children.