It Just Doesn't Figure
Posted by News Editor
Sunday, September 18, 2005

Children Now, UK's weekly magazine for social workers and voluntary children’s organisations, has been using the "16% figure" for the incidence of child sex abuse perpetrated by parents and carers and sourcing it as an NSPCC statistic. Trevor Jones, a social policy researcher has challenged this in a letter in the current (14th September) edition of the magazine as the NSPCC officially puts this figure at 0.4% for parents/step parents and 0.3% for professional carers (see Child Maltreatment in the United Kingdom, NSPCC, November 2000).

According to a Children Now contributor, the 16% of children sexually abused by their parents or carers comes from Jonathan Bradshaw’s "The Well Being of Children" and apologises for using inaccurate statistics. Trevor Jones would therefore advise anyone seeing the 16% figure in published form to challenge it and quote the official NSPCC statistics above. Also be aware that NSPCC always rounds up the figures so that 1% of children are sexually abused by parents and 1% by professional carers, teachers, etc rather than the actual combined total of 0.7%........hardly an epidemic!