Child Sexual Abuse: Then And Now

I was sexually abused in the 1970s.

This was the era of Jimmy Savile, Gary Glitter and Rolf Harris. Also on TV were ‘stranger danger’ adverts warning children against sexual assaults by people they didn’t know. So they didn’t help me. Because I was being abused by my grandfather.

And because of the lax sentencing guidelines at that time, he only received a paltry two year suspended sentence for the years that he repeatedly violated my body. It wasn’t until the Sexual Offences Act 2003, that sentences were increased.

During the time I was being assaulted, the Paedophile Information Exchange openly campaigned to abolish the age of consent and thus legalise sex between children and adults. This group, which allegedly received funding from the Home Office, wasn’t disbanded until 1984.

Nobody questioned whether I was being abused when I wet myself at school. And the Pantasaurus program, teaching bodily autonomy and empowering children to say ‘no,’ didn’t exist. Instead, I felt dirty, ashamed and confused due to what my grandfather was doing to me. Because we were taught that adults should be respected, I reasoned that I must be to blame and this ensured my heavy burden of silence.

The confidential Childline service didn’t exist either. My world was very small and it was easy for the man who abused me to groom everyone I depended on. And indeed, everyone thought he was really nice, not someone who would molest children. And this further silenced me.

As I’d never heard child sexual abuse being discussed, it took a TV programme promoting Childline in 1986, for me to realise that I had been subjected to it myself. However, I didn’t know where to turn to for more information or support because there was no internet.

The internet. And this is where my journey imagining improvements in later decades for victims of child abuse, stops so violently that my head slams into the windscreen.

Because the internet has gifted child sex offenders with additional ways to humiliate, terrorise and blackmail children, from coercing them to penetrate themselves or abuse their younger siblings on camera, to paying as little as £0.93¹ to watch live as another perpetrator abuses a child at their command in another country.

The UK is the third greatest consumer of the live streaming of abuse in the world², where in one month alone, at least 8.8 million³ attempts were made to access child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Like retrieving a drop of black ink thrown into a bucket of water, once CSAM has been shared online, the victim has little or no control over who sees it. Their darkest moments can be downloaded and shared by hundreds or thousands of offenders who get pleasure from watching their pain. And so their abuse never ends.

What’s more, survivors speak of their fear of being recognised in public by these sex offenders. And this fear isn’t unfounded, some victims report having been approached in person by those who enjoyed watching them suffer and were keen to let them know.

Being sexually abused in the 1970s was horrendous. But at least Polaroid and cine cameras weren’t common and it’s highly unlikely that even if my abuse was recorded, that I will ever face the horror of it being shared on the internet.

So sadly, I don’t think it’s better for victims of child sexual abuse today than it was when I was abused. Even the revised sentences for perpetrators are still so low as to be offensive. And for those caught with downloaded CSAM, why aren’t they sentenced for each and every child whose suffering they have collected on their devices?

But there is hope.

Charities such as the Marie Collins Foundation support victims of technology-assisted child sexual abuse and the Internet Watch Foundation continually creates new technologies to remove CSAM from the internet.

And so it is that I need to thank all those who, by profession or otherwise, brave stigma and distress fighting to end child sexual abuse. Because when I’m shocked and utterly demoralised each time child sex offenders devise yet another depraved way to torture and dehumanise children, it’s the actions of these people that reassure and encourage me that things can and will get better.

1. https://www.iicsa.org.uk/reports-recommendations/publications/investigation/internet/part-e-live-streaming/e1-introduction ↩︎
2. https://www.iicsa.org.uk/reports-recommendations/publications/investigation/internet/part-e-live-streaming/e1-introduction ↩︎
3. https://www.iwf.org.uk/news-media/news/millions-of-attempts-to-access-child-sexual-abuse-online-during-lockdown/ ↩︎