What are the most recent statistics on child abuse cases in the UK?
Executive summary
The most recent official and sector figures show police-recorded child abuse and child sexual abuse/exploitation (CSAE) offences at historically high levels: 26,299 police-recorded child cruelty/abuse offences in England and Wales in 2023/24 and 122,768 CSAE offences recorded in 2024, a 6% rise on the previous year [1] [2]. At the same time, survey and charity data underline both the vast hidden prevalence of childhood abuse and important limits in administrative records — the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) estimates 13.6 million adults (29.0%) experienced “any abuse” before age 18 [3] [4].
1. Headline volumes: police records and national analyses
Police-recorded child cruelty/abuse offences in England and Wales reached 26,299 in 2023/24, the peak in that series [1], while specialised analysis of child sexual abuse and exploitation reports 122,768 CSAE offences recorded across 2024 — up 6% from 2023 and driven in part by rising online cases [2]. Charities’ Freedom of Information returns corroborate high volumes in recent years: the NSPCC reported 86,962 sexual offences against children recorded by police across the UK in 2022/23 [5].
2. Changing shape of offending: online and child-perpetrated abuse
Recent national analysis highlights a sharp rise in CSAE with an online footprint — up 26% year-on-year to represent 42% of offences — and that around half of recorded CSAE offences are committed by children aged 10–17 [2]. The National Crime Agency’s strategic assessment similarly flags that much offending now occurs outside the family environment and that tens or hundreds of thousands of adults pose sexual risk to children [6].
3. Child protection system caseloads and types of harm identified
Local authority statistics for children in need and protection plans show neglect and emotional abuse remain the most common initial categories for children on protection plans, together accounting for around half and over one-third of such children respectively in 2024, and over half of children in need had abuse or neglect identified as the primary need at assessment [7]. Serious incident notifications continue to capture the most extreme cases — deaths or serious harm where abuse or neglect is known or suspected — and are reported annually to the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel [8].
4. Prevalence from surveys and the “hidden” scale
The CSEW year ending March 2024 estimates 13.6 million adults (29.0%) experienced any form of abuse before age 18, a scale far larger than administrative records can capture and consistent with long-standing research that most childhood abuse is not reported to services [3] [9]. Specialist organisations stress that service records undercount prevalence and that better national prevalence measurement remains a priority; the ONS has been exploring a dedicated child-abuse prevalence survey and set up a steering group to advise on methodology [10] [4].
5. Sector warnings, risk estimates and emerging threats
Analysts warn that online technology and organised or group-based offending amplify both scale and complexity: national reporting bodies note rising online exploitation, shifts in offender profiles, and estimates that between 710,000 and 840,000 adults may pose varying degrees of sexual risk to children in the UK [6] [2]. Advocacy groups and the CSA Centre point to gaps between the estimated prevalence of child sexual abuse and the level of agency identification in administrative systems [11].
6. What the data do — and cannot — tell policymakers and the public
Collected together, police records, local authority datasets, charity FOIs and survey estimates offer a consistent picture of rising recorded offences and a much larger hidden prevalence, but each source has limitations: police figures capture reported crime, service data reflect known cases to agencies, and surveys measure lifetime prevalence from adults’ recollections [9] [4]. The ONS and sector bodies explicitly caution that no single source provides a full measure of current incidence in childhood and continue to pursue improved measurement tools [10] [12].
7. Bottom line
Recent statistics show police-recorded child abuse and CSAE at very high and in some series rising levels — 26,299 child cruelty/abuse offences in 2023/24 and 122,768 CSAE offences in 2024 — while survey-based prevalence indicates tens of millions of adults experienced abuse in childhood, underscoring a persistent, largely hidden public-health problem and clear evidence gaps that official bodies are actively trying to address [1] [2] [3] [10].