‘Urgent reform’ needed to protect our children, says NSPCC

The NSPCC has published a report which shows that change is needed so that children can get the right support. The last study of this kind was conducted by the NSPCC in 2009.

The report, How safe are our children? 2017 reveals that child abuse is being increasingly reported and police, social services and numerous organisations are ‘doing more than ever’ to take action. There has also been an increase in readiness by adults to report abuse, although this is yet to be translated into justice for victims.

Peter Wanless, chief executive of NSPCC, said: “The process of bringing perpetrators to court and securing a prosecution is woeful. An urgent reform is needed so that children can get the right support and give evidence away from court.”

The report also shows that since the last study, there has been 298 per cent increase in the number of police-recorded indecent image offences in the UK, and in the NSPCC’s latest research with children, four out of five children said they feel social media sites are failing to protect them from pornographic content, self-harm, hatred and bullying.

In the report, the NSPCC call for the UK government to ‘step in’ and commission a study that gives the clearest possible picture of the extent of child abuse and neglect in the UK. The study, according to Wanless, will arm the NSPCC with the ‘right knowledge to help everyone play their part in keeping children safe: because every childhood is worth fighting for’.

Richard Watts, chair of the Local Government Association’s Children and Young People Board, has responded to the report, saying: “The dramatic rise in the number of reports of emotional abuse is extremely concerning. Emotional abuse has been an area of growing concern for a number of years, and councils across the country have taken steps to make sure children referred to children’s services receive appropriate care and support. A nationwide study that looks at the frequency of child abuse and neglect would be a helpful step in building a better understanding of the scale of abuse across the country, but urgent action is required to ensure that services protecting children have the resources to respond quickly and efficiently to any crisis. Councils have worked hard to protect funding for child protection services, but ongoing cuts to local authority budgets are forcing many areas to make extremely difficult decisions about how to allocate increasingly scarce resources.”

He added: “With pressures facing children’s services becoming rapidly unsustainable, we are calling on the Government to ensure that councils have the funding they need to tackle the early stages of abuse and keep children and young people safe in the years to come.”