You asked
Your 2015/2016 Crime Survey for England and Wales sought for the first time to measure experiences of abuse by children as reported in adulthood.
Please could you explain the rationale for your definition of childhood abuse as encompassing only those acts committed by adults?
The age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales is 10, yet your methodology does not allow for collection of experiences of people abused psychologically, physically or sexually in childhood by perpetrators between the ages of 10 and 18.
What was the rationale for excluding these types of abuse from your data collection methodology?
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
As you mention, a module of questions attempting to measure adults’ experience of abuse during childhood was included in the 2015-16 Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW). This was the first time we had asked these questions and it was the start of a new strand of work to improve insight into the serious issue of child abuse.
When developing this module, we recognised a key challenge would be separating sibling and peer incidents from the abuse the survey is trying to capture. For example, a one-off incident of a child hitting their sibling would not typically be considered as child abuse.
To separate out these incidents would require many additional questions to assess the severity of the incident to determine whether it should be classed as abuse. Given the limited space within the CSEW for this first release, it was decided to restrict the perpetrators to adults across the whole module, where the seriousness of the incident is automatically implicit.
Following analysis of this module, and in consultation with stakeholders, we revised this set of questions to include in the Crime Survey for 2018-19. As part of this development, we changed the wording for the questions on sexual abuse to include all incidents, regardless of the age of the perpetrator. This reflects the fact that all sexual incidents asked about would be deemed serious.
However, the questions concerning psychological and physical abuse have remained the same and ask whether an adult committed the offence. For psychological abuse, this is because the behaviours included in this question would typically only apply to people with responsibility for the child. For physical abuse, as previously mentioned, the survey would capture too many instances such as sibling rivalries and playground incidents, that would not typically be considered physical child abuse.
We recognise that people can be psychologically or physically abused in childhood by perpetrators under the age of 18. However, it is not realistically possible to measure child abuse in this kind of detail without a separate dedicated survey. We are currently investigating the feasibility of conducting a dedicated survey on childhood abuse in the future.
If you have any crime-related queries in the future, you can email crimestatistics@ons.gov.uk and we will endeavour to help.