NOVANEWS
More than 6,000 minors in Britain have been at risk of sex exploitation since last year, a new report finds.
Data, obtained by Channel 4 News from 88 councils, reported 6,300 children across the country as vulnerable to sexual abuse in the past 18 months.
Ann Coffey, the Labour MP for Stockport who is chairing an inquiry into child exploitation, said she was not surprised by the report.
“Child sexual exploitation has been under-identified for a very long time”, she said, adding that the police cannot tackle the problem by themselves.
Meanwhile, the British police force released figures showing a spike in child abuse, rape and physical assault cases linked to witchcraft in the UK.
Figures released by British police on Wednesday showed a total of 24 cases of ritualistic child abuse were referred to Scotland Yard in 2013 alone, and that the number has has been on the rise for the last 10 years, with a reported 148 cases since 2004.
The reports come almost two months after an inquiry found that nearly 1,400 children in the British town of Rotherham were sexually exploited over a 16-year period, from 1997 to 2013.
This is not the first time that child abuse reports make headlines in the UK as in 2013 members of a sadistic pedophile ring were found guilty of extreme abuse of schoolgirls as young as 11 in Oxford, southern England.
