The latest child abuse statistics simply don’t stack up

Have 425,000 children really been abused during the past two years? That is the extraordinary claim suggested in a report put out earlier this week by the Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, which was swallowed whole by the Today programme and many newspapers. Not even the normally-inquisitive John Humphrys raised the slightest doubt about the figure when he interviewed a woman who said she had been abused back in the 1960s.

The more you dig into the data, though, the more that the estimate of 425,000 child abuse victims comes across as a pure fantasy figure. It is based on a statistical method called Multiple Systems Estimation, which involves totting up the number of reported cases of child sex abuse reported to police, social services and voluntary bodies and then trying to eliminate the overlap – in other word take account of the inevitability that a child recorded by the police as having been abused is also likely to have been reported to social services.