The Truth About Child Sex Abuse

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

Today the Children's Commissioner has produced

the most authoritative report yet of abuse in or around the family,

where most child abuse occurs. Its results are horrifying.

Tonight, we look at all the latest research to reveal

the reality of a crime that seems to be out of control.

Setting aside terrorism,

it's the greatest challenge the police service faces this century.

I'm a clinical psychologist.

Listening to survivors of abuse

exposes the sheer scale of the problem we face.

I honestly thought it was something that happens in families,

but no-one talks about.

I thought every child... that happened to at night.

I'm an investigative journalist.

I've explored many high-profile cases of child sex abuse.

Tonight, we focus on the hidden crimes against children of all ages.

The abuse is anything that you can imagine -

the majority in a family setting, in a family home.

Maybe 10-12% of the adult population of the UK

have occasional, if not frequent, sexual thoughts

involving teenage children.

We'll be using our different skills and the shocking new statistics

to strip away the myths and to answer the key questions.

How common is child sex abuse?

How much goes unreported?

Where and when does it happen? Who are the abusers?

And, most of all, how can they be stopped?

Good afternoon and welcome to the BBC News At One -

the mother of the missing five-year-old April Jones

broke down in tears as she made an emotional plea this lunchtime.

We are desperate for any news.

April is only five years old.

Please, please help find her.

On 1st October 2012,

five-year-old April Jones was abducted and murdered.

It's like...

How do you feel when your child is murdered?

You've got to live the rest of your life

knowing that you let your child out to play.

Local man Mark Bridger took April

as she played outside her home in mid-Wales.

He was jailed for life.

Now April's parents campaign

for greater understanding of child sex abuse.

When it happened with April, I wanted everybody locked away,

killed, hung, you name it.

But all you are doing then is locking everybody away

that has done it - but if you can stop them

before they do it, it's a lot safer for children and parents.

People, they think, "Why should we help the paedophile?

"We should be prosecuting them, throwing them in jail,

"having them castrated," but if we offer help to paedophiles,

we might save children who MIGHT have been abused.

We want them to go and get help before they do the crime

so it protects the children.

-So this, for you, is about child protection.

-Yes.

We don't want to see other families going through this.

Paul and Coral Jones have tried to put aside their anger and grief

to find more effective ways of protecting children.

The murder of children is extremely rare.

But it is becoming more and more clear child sex abuse is not.

Today's report from the Children's Commissioner combines statistics

from police, social services and voluntary organisations.

Its findings are chilling.

The report reveals that, in England alone,

in a two-year period between 2012 and 2014,

an estimated 425,000 children and young people were sexually abused.

That's almost half a million.

These are shocking numbers, aren't they?

They are shocking, they are awful.

We found this level of data

because, as part of my role as Children's Commissioner,

I've got the powers to get the data from authorities

with the names and the information behind that.

We've been able to cross-correlate this

so it is a critical assessment.

It's also a very reliable number for us to work on.

To put the figures in perspective,

we have created what we might call Everytown -

a typical English town of 100,000 people,

roughly the size of Worcester, Mansfield or Lincoln.

425,000 victims nationwide is equivalent,

in a town like this, to almost 800 children -

roughly one in every school class.

But even more shocking is how much of this abuse remains hidden.

The report estimates that just one in eight children who are abused

come forward and report it.

The voices of the rest go unheard.

The vast majority of children experiencing this awful crime

don't report so aren't getting help.

They suffer in silence behind closed doors.

I was scared every night.

I used to go to bed and, you know, I used to wear layers and layers

of clothes just so it would, you know, try and protect myself.

-Yeah.

-I would wrap myself up and try and cocoon myself

because I was always scared that they would come in.

Millie is 17. She was abused from the age of six.

Her story sheds horrific light on why so few children report abuse.

-Your mother's partner...

-Yep.

-..was the abuser?

-Yep.

-And also your mother?

-As well as my mum, yeah.

He sort of put in the initial idea,

but she was the controller, the manipulator,

she would turn round and say, "Yes, we can do that," or, "We can't."

She used to ask me, "Do you want to come into our room tonight?"

And I would say yes cos I was too scared to say no.

What would be the consequence if you'd said no?

It would just be she didn't talk to me for weeks.

I'd have to fend for myself.

They never hit me. Well, my mum used to slap me,

but he never hit me.

It would just be hell to live there.

She'd neglect you, she'd freeze you out?

-Yeah. I wouldn't be in the family. I felt lower than the dog.

-Right.

Were you threatened or manipulated to not tell people?

Yeah, it was something that...

I honestly thought it was something that happens in families,

but no-one talks about.

Almost like it was trivial.

-You thought it was kind of normal?

-Yeah.

-That this is what happened?

Yeah, no-one told me any different.

I didn't turn round and say anything

because I thought every child... that happened to at night.

For children, abuse by a family member

or someone around the family environment

puts into question who there is in the world that they can turn to.

This is one of the reasons that children don't tell others.

They need to be able to go to people they can trust,

and if the harm's coming from that environment,

they have nowhere to go.

The statistics suggest that, of children who suffer sexual abuse,

around two-thirds are abused either by someone in the family

or by someone they know through the family.

A survey of adult survivors of abuse within the family environment

shows that many had more than one abuser.

By far the most common was a male family friend or neighbour -

identified by 40%.

25% said they had been abused by their own father.

Brothers, uncles, stepfathers

and grandfathers were all high up on the list.

And astonishingly, like Millie,

almost 10% reported being abused by their own mother.

Statistics show that women often abuse with a man.

Many are bullied and coerced by that man, but not all.

It wasn't the case that she was just following his lead,

it sounds like she was actively leading him.

-She wanted to do it as well.

-Right.

I felt like, "What is wrong with me to not get a real mum?

"Why didn't I get a mum?"

It's really upsetting to think that I felt...

I didn't feel worthy of a mum.

'Millie introduced me to her friend Cameron,

'who she met through a local support service.'

When I was ten, I was sexually abused by my dad for five years,

till the age of 15 and... Yeah.

Were you aware that what was happening wasn't right?

I did want to say something to someone,

but I thought, where it was my dad, maybe no-one would believe me.

And what about your mum?

Did you never think you'd be able to tell your mum?

I weren't sure whether he'd hurt me or not.

-Right, so there was fear.

-Yeah.

How did it stop? What happened?

My mum actually walked in on what was happening

and phoned the police.

'Cameron's father went to prison for 15 months.'

What stops boys particularly from talking about sexual abuse?

I think, with boys and men, it's the pride

cos men are seen as strong people who can get through anything

and I think sometimes it can be if someone finds out,

they'll call you gay and torment you for it.

And did you have that experience?

Yeah, in school, I actually told my best friend,

or I thought he was and, a couple of weeks later,

it was round the whole school

and everyone was calling me gay and bullying me because of it.

So this is art done by lads that you're working with here.

The guys you are working with here.

Yeah, over the past five or six years.

So these are men who've been abused as children.

Yes, yeah.

'Duncan Craig runs a charity for male survivors of sexual abuse.'

This one I think is probably the most shocking

in terms of just the real power and depth of it.

"I'll show you how to be a real man if you cry again.

"Watch what I do to your mum."

Do men under-report having been abused?

Definitely, yeah.

All the research that's out there proves that.

A male seems to blame himself more than, in my experience, a female.

"I should have been able to push him off,"

"I should have been able to get rid of him,"

"I should have been able to stop it,"

and if you're dealing with something

or you feel shameful about something, why would you speak out?

Of children who report abuse,

just over a quarter are male.

Survivors Manchester's database suggests that, like girls,

most boys under 16 are abused by someone they know.

As with Cameron, it also suggests the abuse begins early.

We're looking at a vast majority, in the 80-81%

of men were abused under the age of 12.

-So prepubescent.

-Yeah.

I often hear stories about men who we're working with,

trying to think about when did it stop,

and what it felt like to them

was that they got too old for the abuser now.

-Right.

-So from kind of 12 or 13, suddenly now, "I'm too old."

This graph shows the breakdown of the age

when abuse happens in or around the family.

It shows that around a third of abuse

happens to children of 12 or older - mostly adolescents.

But the biggest group is among children below the age of puberty.

These are often the victims of a specific type of offender -

the paedophile.

The words "paedophile" and "child abuser"

are often used interchangeably.

But they are not always same thing.

And understanding the difference

is important for understanding - and preventing - child sex abuse.

Michael, what's a clinical definition of a paedophile?

Well, the clinical definition

that most people who work in this area use

is to describe someone who is sexually attracted

to prepubescent children.

So, this is a child

who's not showing any signs of sexual development.

How prevalent is paedophilia?

I think a reasonable estimate

for the general male population is around 1%.

I base that on some recent surveys,

large surveys done in Germany and in Scandinavia.

My estimate includes men

who are exclusively attracted to young children,

but also men who are able to have relationships with adults as well,

but they do have a significant interest in young children.

1% might sound like a small number,

but, in the context of the whole population,

it is an alarming figure.

It would mean there are more than 250,000 -

that's a quarter of a million - paedophiles in the UK.

In our Everytown - population 100,000 -

this would mean almost 400 men

who have a persistent sexual attraction

to prepubescent children, whether they act on it or not.

I went to meet someone that we will call Mike.

He has twice been convicted for downloading indecent images

of children from the internet,

although not for physical abuse of a child.

'He has since undergone therapy.'

It breaks my heart to know what I've done, it really does.

Why?

Because, every time you look at those images,

you're abusing a child.

The images you were looking at,

they were images of attractive young children

or sexual images of children?

Both. I saw everything.

So this includes children being raped, abused?

Yeah.

Is it nature or is it nurture?

Is this how you're made,

is this how you're wired or is it something that somehow you,

through your early life experiences,

your childhood, you became this person?

I've got no experiences in my younger life

that can point to anything to create this.

The only thing I believe after long discussion with family, with friends

is this must be natural, and I think it is for a lot of people.

The question of whether people are born paedophiles is controversial.

So, what does the science tell us?

I travelled to Canada to meet psychologist Dr James Cantor,

whose studies of paedophiles' brains have produced striking conclusions.

Paedophilia is a sexual orientation.

Paedophilia is something

that we are essentially born with,

does not appear to change over time

and it's as core to our being as any other sexual orientation is.

Tell me what it is it that you have been looking at in terms of the brain

and the brain of the paedophile.

In the brain, there is a sex network.

We didn't find anything different in any one part of the brain,

rather that we're seeing differences in how parts are cabled together.

These green stripes going through the middle of the white areas,

-those are the cables.

-Right.

This red part is the area of the cable

that is different between the paedophiles and the non-paedophiles.

It's very easy to think of this literally as a cross-wiring.

It's as if, in these people, when they perceive a child,

it's triggering the sexual instincts

instead of triggering the nurturing instincts.

So, how does this happen? What's gone on?

We've been able to narrow it down a little bit

by looking at other things

that make paedophiles different from non-paedophiles.

What we found are that paedophiles

are more than three times more likely to be non-right-handed -

that is paedophiles are more than three times as likely

to be left-handed or ambidextrous.

Another one of the things

that turned out to be important was physical height.

Paedophiles are about two-and-a-half centimetres too short.

They're shorter than people who commit other kinds of offences.

This doesn't mean left-handed and short people

are significantly more likely to be paedophiles.

But these features tend to be determined during early pregnancy.

Could this be when paedophilia develops?

One of the possibilities is that something very general

has gone wrong, maternal stress,

something we could treat with vitamins or better nutrition

for women early in pregnancy.

It would be wonderful if increasing the amount of prenatal care

available to women cures both paedophilia -

or at least prevents it from developing -

at the same time as increasing the potential health for the kid.

If paedophilia is hard-wired in the brain,

that would mean that paedophiles are fundamentally incurable.

But there is another leading Canadian researcher

who completely disagrees.

Do you all consider yourself as paedophiles?

Is that how you would describe yourself?

-No.

-Not any more?

'Dr Paul Fedoroff claims to be able to cure paedophilia,

'using therapy and anti-androgen drugs

'that temporarily remove the sex drive.'

We take sex off the table and we give them

a chance then to develop healthy lifestyles.

Get a job and establish a relationship with someone

who's consensual and so forth that's not primarily based on sex.

And once they're in that situation,

then we stop the anti-androgens, that their sex drive comes back.

And it turns out that if it develops in a normal healthy relationship,

they start to have sexual activities with their partner,

which they both enjoy.

So you stop the medication, they regain their sex drive

and almost, hey presto, they're now attracted to the adult partner

and no longer attracted to children, is that right?

Right, their preference changes to adult.

And that's what you would say is then that they are cured?

Right, wouldn't you?

'It's a remarkable claim.

'I wanted to test it by talking to one of Dr Fedoroff's patients -

'a man recently released from prison.'

Would it be OK for you to tell me what your crime was?

I molested my two daughters.

Dr Fedoroff's programme was a real eye-opener.

The fact that, yeah, change is possible, wow, what an idea.

I mean, I can stop being the piece of garbage that I think I am

and actually be a person.

How do you explain that change?

What has happened to make that change possible?

You learn that certain thoughts are very inappropriate

and now, when I have those thoughts,

that's exactly what I deem them as.

So, you still have those thoughts sometimes?

Especially about my victims.

About your daughters?

They're deemed very inappropriate.

But you still may have thoughts about your victims,

about your daughters?

Yeah. When I do, I pray for them.

So, if you're having thoughts, you're not cured

because the thoughts are a symptom

of having a sexual desire towards children.

Yeah, but I wouldn't classify myself as a paedophile.

That's history.

'Despite Dr Fedoroff's claim that he can cure paedophilia,

'most experts believe that, once they've reached adulthood,

'paedophiles' sexual desires are fixed.

'If this is true, then what can be done?'

PHONE RINGS

Good morning. Stop It Now helpline, how can I help you?

You don't have to give me your full name,

but if you do and give me information

that identifies a child at risk of being abused,

we will pass that information on to the appropriate agencies.

'Stop It Now runs a helpline.

'Among others, it takes calls from potential abusers.'

Do you ever find the work disturbing?

There can be times.

My main aim is so that they don't reoffend.

So to establish some trust, to talk with them

and to find out what's been happening

so that I can give them practical, sustainable, realistic advice.

I know what I'm doing's wrong, but I can't stop.

I'll be arrested if I tell anyone. I'm trapped.

Who is there to talk to anyway?

'Stop It Now doesn't offer a cure for paedophilia.

'It offers therapy and advice

'about how to control inappropriate sexual desires.

'It's run by one of Britain's

'leading experts on child sex abusers.'

Why should we provide help to those who've committed

or enjoy viewing images of heinous crimes that are committed

against children, why should we help them?

Look, if someone has come to formal attention,

I'm not here to shelter them

from the consequences of the criminal law.

All I'm saying is my primary concern

is in protecting children and, if we start from that premise,

what's the best to protect children, then we have to extend services

that would help sex offenders not be dangerous to children tomorrow.

But can this approach work?

If sexual desires are fixed and permanent, can they be controlled?

'I went to see someone we'll call Chris.

'He's a paedophile, but has undergone intensive therapy

'and says he has never abused a child or viewed indecent images.'

What strategies do you use in order not to act on your urges?

For me, it was learning the difference

between want and need.

You know, we all experience urges to do things,

but it is just an urge, it doesn't mean that you have to do something

and just as you can make the choice to act on that feeling,

you can just as easily make the choice NOT to.

I think that your sexual desires, my sexuality

is who I am, it's what I was born with and that's my nature.

The way I act and my feeling,

my moral feeling that to act on that sexual impulse is wrong

and to harm a child is wrong

is down to the fact that I was brought up

with a very clear moral compass,

a very clear idea of what is right and wrong.

Not all paedophiles are child abusers

and whatever assistance, help, signposting,

advice and deterrents that we can provide to paedophiles

to help contain those interests,

that's something we should really aim for

and obviously a critical aim for us at the NSPCC

is to ensure that people with those sexual interests don't act on them.

There's no question that paedophiles who abuse children must be locked up.

But there IS evidence

that some paedophiles can manage their behaviour.

But what about other child abusers?

If we go back to our graph of the age that abuse happens,

we see that many children are 12, 13 or older -

beyond the age when paedophiles normally target them.

So, that raises the question - who is abusing THESE children?

Isn't anyone who abuses a child a paedophile?

No, they're not. I mean, in the public conception, they might be,

but, for our purposes, it's really important to distinguish

those who are and those who are not.

There is a group of people, of menfolk, in particular,

but some women, who will sexually abuse adolescent children.

They may not be sexually attracted

to younger children, but to teenagers.

So it's quite important to distinguish the paedophile

from other forms of sex offender.

The first hug, I think, I will never, ever forget, cos I remember

that feeling in my stomach and in my gut and I felt sick.

And how old were you, sorry?

-13.

-13.

And then it sort of evolved from that to sexual assaults

and stuff quite quickly.

'Yehudis was abused by a family friend.

'Like younger victims, most teenagers are abused

'either by a member of the family

'or someone they know through the family.'

How did the abuse take place? Did he just take you off places?

There was all different ways. He'd follow me around the house

so if everyone was in the kitchen or something

and I was in the living room, he'd sort of miraculously appear there.

He'd offer me rides

where I would look the silly one for not taking a ride.

So I'd end up having to be in the car with him

and lots of things happened in the car.

I just kept imagining that I actually would be better off dead

because I didn't know how I was going to get out of that situation.

So it took you to thoughts of suicide.

Yes, daily.

There almost comes with more of a stigma or an embarrassment

just to say, "Well, I was a teenager,

"why didn't I know what was happening?"

or, "Stop it," or, "Teenagers can be seductive,"

or, "They can initiate these sort of things,"

and all these weird connotations.

And I felt so responsible and so guilty

and not knowing how to stop it.

Abusers who are not clinically paedophiles

often target adolescents,

but they sometimes target younger children as well.

Some have a very specific attraction to children going through puberty.

And there's another group who think their sexual attraction

to young teenagers is normal -

that they are no different to the rest of the male population.

There are some concerning studies

that would suggest that maybe 10-12%

of the adult population of the UK have occasionally, if not frequent,

sexual thoughts involving teenage children.

But they manage those thoughts, they don't act on them

and they put them where they belong.

For the sex offender, though,

they persuade themselves that this behaviour is OK

or they're in a situation where they don't care.

These abusers, like the abusers of younger children, are rarely caught.

They exploit the fact that traumatised, terrified children

generally don't come forward to report what has happened to them.

And even when these children do tell somebody,

all too often, nobody listens.

The figures are disturbing.

The Children's Commissioner's report asked victims what happened

when they told someone about the abuse.

Just one in five said it led to the abuse stopping completely.

Shockingly, almost the same proportion

said that the abuse actually got worse as a result -

that the child was, in effect, punished.

Sometimes adults simply don't believe children

who tell them about abuse.

They may find it too shocking or confusing.

They may have divided loyalties or be complicit.

Some will be victims of the abuser themselves.

So often when children disclose, they're not heard,

they're not listened to.

The number of times it can take children

to try to disclose the abuse before they're heard

and before it stops can sometimes be three, four, five, six times

and it needs to be as early as possible.

When adults do listen and do act,

all too often the abuser is not punished.

Even when abuse is reported to the police,

in three out of four cases, no criminal charges are brought

and conviction rates are lower still.

In the two-year period between 2012 and 2014,

when research suggests around 425,000 children

were sexually abused, there were fewer than 6,500 convictions

for contact child sex abuse in England.

Why is that number so small?

I think these are incredibly complex investigations

where you simply have the offender and the victim,

and unless you have physical evidence,

you are then in a situation where you have the word of the victim

against the word of the offender,

which makes it difficult to prosecute.

I mean, by and large, experts who work with children

say that children don't make this stuff up.

If they're saying they're abused,

it's very likely that they have been abused.

25% of those cases leading to a perpetrator being charged

is just terrible.

Yeah, and I would want it to be a lot higher,

but, as I've said, these are very, very difficult cases to deal with.

The stark reality is that for the majority of children

who report this to the authorities,

they won't see their perpetrators brought to justice.

Waiting for children to take the responsibility

and the burden to disclose this awful experience is not enough.

We have to change the system, we have to change our approach

to ensure that we're looking for the signs and symptoms

and we're supporting children

to tell us in a way that is supportive to them.

'As an adult, Yehudis did bring her abuser to court.

'As so often, it was her word against his.'

You have to stand on the stand all day

and just take a beating from a defence lawyer.

Tell me a bit about that. Why would you describe it as a beating?

Oh, I felt like I was in a boxing ring.

Erm, sorry...

No, it's all right, sweetheart.

He called me a liar every second word.

It sounds like you were actually being abused all over again.

In a very different way, yeah.

'Yehudis's abuser spent 18 months in prison.'

But not all abusers are adults.

One of the most startling revelations

of the new Children's Commissioner's report

is that a third of those who abuse children are other children

or young people under the age of 18.

'I went to meet the director of an intervention centre in Wales

'for children displaying harmful sexual behaviour.'

Can you give me a sense of the kind of child

that you would be treating here?

Our young people will have been through

very difficult and traumatic early childhood experiences,

so we're talking about neglect,

trauma, attachment difficulties, poor parenting experiences.

Sometimes that will have included sexual abuse in their own histories.

If we were to break this down

in terms of a nature versus nurture position,

this is about nurture issues.

The vast majority of young people of whichever age

who engage in maladaptive sexual behaviour

with other children will grow out of that,

or with the right sorts of support and intervention

are able to understand where that's come from,

deal with victim work and move on from these incidents.

There's no question - early intervention,

early intervention, early intervention.

Children who abuse are very often victims themselves.

They can respond to treatment and change.

Centres like Kevin's are highly effective

in reducing the overall amount of child sex abuse.

But despite the measures put in place to protect children,

there are fears that abuse could be on the increase.

Above all, experts are concerned at the impact of the internet.

The internet is a huge problem.

There are now more indecent images of children

in circulation than there ever have been.

There are more people, I believe,

using chatroom facilities to groom children.

and more children, I believe,

are being abused as a result of that.

We suspect that there are approximately 50,000 people

online in the UK downloading child abuse material.

The abuse is anything that you can imagine.

We have some images of babies that are a few months old

that have been quite brutally sexually abused by offenders,

right up until the latter age of 17-year-olds being abused.

There are certain types of offenders -

the ones that, because they want the kudos,

because they want people to know

and understand that they are the abuser of the child,

they will sometimes have the child hold up either a Post-It note

or a placard that says the date,

or even the username that that offender uses online

in order to prove to the community

that they are in fact the abuser of that child.

'Today, Paul and Coral Jones are leading a determined campaign

'to drive paedophiles and other child sex offenders from the internet.'

Child sex abuse images were viewed by Mark Bridger.

Do you think they were part of the process

that led him to what he then did to April?

-Yeah, I do.

-You do. Tell me why you think that.

He'd had these images on his computer for a fair while

and he was known on his computer to be seeing these images

only three hours before he took April.

-Three hours?

-Three hours.

Only three hours and he had, I think,

it was nearly 400 images on there.

Do you feel that it is a real risk that people will go,

will progress from viewing sex abuse images of children

to then wanting to contact abuse? Do you see that as a kind of...

There's a definite link.

When we went to court, Mark Bridger, with his lifestyle and everything,

and with his downloading of these images,

it was proved in court that there was a procedure

that he went through and eventually took April.

So, yes, there is a link there.

If there had been a child available to you

when you were looking at those images,

would viewing those images have made it more likely

that you may yourself then have abused that child?

I hope, in my heart of hearts, that I wouldn't cross that line.

But would I have done it? I don't know.

I just pray that I wouldn't have done it.

But you can't say that you...

-I can't say,

-..100% would not have done?

-No.

But the internet also offers an opportunity

in the fight against child sex abuse.

It's something that's quite discreet

and I need to speak to you in private.

It means the police are no longer

entirely dependent on child victims and their ability to report abuse.

As a detective working in the police,

whenever I dealt with theft, shoplifting, even violent offences,

one of the first things I looked for was the CCTV.

Well, that is what an indecent image of a child is.

It's the CCTV that the offender has captured for us.

We're using some amazing technology here.

Images have certain clues contained within them.

We analyse that in order to find out where the image originated from.

If we look at the figures from last year,

we saved 100 children from being further abused by people in the UK -

and that was just this team.

You didn't disclose.

It was through the internet that the abuse came to light.

They were exchanging pornographic pictures through other people,

I think there was a network of people that were exchanging pictures

and the police caught one of them and caught all of them.

So if they'd never taken it as far as the internet,

I don't think I would have said anything,

I don't think they would have been caught.

Millie's abusers were both jailed.

The fight against child sex abuse is at a turning point.

Police investigations into internet offences

have led to more and more abusers being identified.

Cases like Jimmy Savile's

have led to thousands of victims coming forward.

This is a moment of opportunity.

This year, we'll investigate circa 70,000 allegations

of child sexual abuse, which is a really significant increase.

It's an 88% increase on the figures we saw in 2012.

40-50% of Crown Court time now

is taken up with dealing with sex offenders.

What we now have to focus on

is how we stop that abuse taking place in the first place

because, by the time the abuse is reported, the damage is done.

We need to seize the moment to improve the criminal justice system,

so it does more to identify, investigate

and prosecute this crime.

Traumatised, terrified children can't always help themselves.

Parents, professionals - all of us - we need to learn that children

sometimes speak without words and we have to learn to spot the signs.

I used to self-harm quite a bit. It was a cry for help.

I wasn't attention seeking but it was, er, "Help me,"

and it was a visual, because I couldn't explain it.

I couldn't articulate it. I didn't know how to turn round

and say to one of my family members, "Oh, this is happening."

So, I was hurting myself in the hope

that someone would turn round and notice and ask me why.

-But, no-one did.

-No-one did?

No-one noticed.

There are many children

and teenagers who are living the nightmare of abuse right now.

They must know that help is available

and that there is life after abuse.

'Today, Yehudis runs a charity for survivors of child sexual abuse

'and has just got married.

'Cameron has got his first job...

'..while Millie is studying for her A-levels

'and applying for university.'

You don't feel like a victim.

No, I'm not a victim.

I'm a survivor, I'm here.

What does that mean? Tell me.

Even though I've gone through that horrible time in my life,

I understand that I have got so much potential

to have an amazing life and I've got so much time

that I can make a change and I can do whatever I want to do

and I can have aspirations and achieve them

and just enjoy my life.

Look at you smiling.