Child sexual abuse is a heinous crime that evokes a strong emotional reaction because it is so hard to make sense of. What kind of adult would do that to a child? But it is also more common than often acknowledged: conservative estimates suggest 15% of girls and 5% of boys experience some form of sexual abuse before the age of 16, which makes it as common as physical and emotional abuse.
Every so often, stories about terrible scandals involving child sexual abuse – from grooming gangs to Jimmy Savile to football clubs – punctuate the public consciousness. But the reality that underpins the headlines is that child sexual abuse affects every community; abuse within the family is most common and social services pick up just a fraction of the abuse that happens, leaving hundreds of thousands of children to suffer alone.
There are huge problems in how we detect, respond to and try to prevent child sexual abuse as a society. Because it is such a stigmatised crime, it is unusual for children to verbally disclose the fact and professionals who work with children often have inadequate training in the signs of child sexual abuse and routinely under-detect it. Because it is so uncomfortable for us as adults to confront the fact that child abusers walk among us – certainly in our own communities, sometimes in our own families – there is a tendency to “other” child sexual abuse as a crime: to see it as something people not like us do to children we don’t know. Thus the justified...
Published on April 28, 2026 In a determined effort to protect the reputation of one of Africa’s most iconic wildlife destinations, Kenya’s Tourism Regulatory Authority has strongly denied false cl...