1 Introduction

In the contemporary era, child sexual abuse (CSA) has risen high on the agendas of policymakers who aim to tackle social problems. Moreover, in recent years, there has been much media exposure in this area due to a string of high-profile cases involving the sexual abuse of children, and this has led to speculation that such abuse may be much more prevalent than previously thought. Indeed, Smith (2016) reports that Britain may in fact have been ignoring an epidemic of child abuse cases, as some 30,000 new cases of CSA have come forwards in the past few years, at a rate of around one hundred per month, as a result of the Goddard Inquiry (which was set up after the discovery of years of CSA by TV celebrity Jimmy Savile). Moreover, it is expected that in the coming years, this figure will mushroom further, with one senior officer predicting that the police will be investigating around 200,000 cases across the country by the year 2020. Therefore, this paper aims to examine CSA in the contemporary era and explore prevalence levels via analyses of media sources, empirical studies, and official statistics, so that a more comprehensive picture of this particular crime can be gleaned.

2 Understanding the Prevalence Levels of Child Sexual Abuse (CSA)

Johnston (2017) reports that in 2016, an NSPCC report warned that as many as 500,000 people in the UK could be involved in sharing indecent images of children online, which is a huge number of cases to investigate on increasingly limited police resources. For example, the West Yorkshire police have been investigating 180 cases of child sexual exploitation alone, which is three times as many as the previous year – which includes 124 arrests, and 23 who have been charged and who are awaiting prosecution (Halliday, 2015). Thus, if this is the true extent of this problem, then custodial sentences may not be the answer, as Britain’s prisons could simply not, at their present capacity, house such a large increase in inmates.

Furthermore, as noted, in recent years, the emergence of a number of celebrities and politicians involved in CSA has shocked many people in the UK, with Laville (2015) reporting on 1,400 cases of CSA which have come to light as a result of the Operation Hydrant Inquiry, which has revealed 76 politicians, 43 people from the music industry, and 135 from TV, film or radio who have been involved in CSA cases. Thus, such abuse has involved household names such as Fred Talbot (a TV weatherman), Rolf Harris (a children’s TV presenter), Jimmy Savile (also a children’s TV presenter), musician Gary Glitter, and newsreader Stuart Hall (Laville, 2015) – who were all previously well-loved celebrities who have since been punished with custodial sentences.

In respect of the prevalence levels of CSA, Stoltenborgh, Van Ijzendoorn & Euser (2011) also look at such abuse on a global scale and have carried out a meta-analysis of the combined prevalence figures of CSA in 217 publications that were published between 1980 and 2008 – which included 331 cumulative independent samples, and a total of just under ten million participants. Thus, this is an extensive study. It was found that the overall global prevalence of CSA was at 127/1000, which represents around 12.7% of the world’s population, which is a staggering finding. Moreover, such abuse was also found to be more common among females, at 18% compared to 7.6% for boys. In addition, a similar study has also been conducted by Pereda, Guilera, Forns & Gomez-Benito (2009), who found global prevalence rates of CSA of 19.7% for women, and 7.9% for men, which mirrors the findings of Stoltenborgh, Van Ijzendoorn & Euser (2011) via a meta-analysis this time of some sixty-five articles in twenty-two countries – again, an extensive analysis that when combined with that of Stoltenborgh, Van Ijzendoorn & Euser (2011) offers a rigorous and reliable dataset.

In Britain specifically, a study done in the 1980s by Baker & Duncan (1985) found that in a sample of some 2019 men and women aged fifteen and over, who were interviewed as part of a MORI survey, 10% of the sample said that they had been sexually abused before the age of sixteen (12% for females, and 8% for males), which although lower than the global averages documented by Stoltenborgh, Van Ijzendoorn & Euser (2011) and Pereda, Guilera, Forns & Gomez-Benito (2009), is still a considerable amount. Moreover, in the study conducted by Baker & Duncan (1985), there was no significant correlation found between CSA and social class or location, and it was therefore estimated that around 4.5 million adults in Britain would have been sexually abused as children at this time, with the social and mental health implications being deemed to be enormous; and