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More than 300 million children a year face sexual abuse online, study suggests


A researcher said the number of male offenders in the UK alone ‘could stretch all the way from Glasgow to London’.

In what marks the first global estimate of the scale of the crisis, researchers at the University of Edinburgh found one in eight, or 12.6%, of the world’s children have been victims of non-consensual talking, sharing and exposure to sexual images and video in the past year, amounting to about 302 million young people. The university’s Childlight initiative – which aims to understand the prevalence of child abuse – includes a new global index, Into The Light, which found one in nine men in the US (almost 14 million) admitted online offending against children at some point. Childlight chief executive Paul Stanfield said: “This is on a staggering scale that in the UK alone equates to forming a line of male offenders that could stretch all the way from Glasgow to London – or filling Wembley Stadium 20 times over.

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