This article has been brought to you by Slough Borough Council's Education Safeguarding Professional, Zarine Power for the attention of all Schools.
NSPCC Learning has published a new statistics briefing on harmful sexual behaviour. It looks at data and statistics about harmful sexual behaviour in the UK to help professionals make evidence-based decisions, covering the scale of the issue and what data tells us about children who experienced or display harmful sexual behaviour.
How common is harmful sexual behaviour?
We do not know the true number of children and young people affected by harmful sexual behaviour (HSB). HSB covers a wide range of behaviours, many of which do not come to the attention of authorities. However, some attempts to estimate the prevalence of HSB have been made using data from children’s self-reported experiences of sexual abuse by other children and services which work with children who display HSB.
From this research we can estimate that around a third of child sexual abuse is by other children and young people.
This briefing looks at what data and statistics are available about HSB to help professionals, and the organisations they work for, make evidence-based decisions.
Read the full briefing: Harmful sexual behaviour: statistics briefing