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<p>There are over 58,000 Registered Sex Offenders in the UK. A conservative estimate
of the National Crime Agency (NCA) is that around 80,000 people in the UK present
some kind of sexual threat to children online, while the Centre of Expertise on Child
Sexual Abuse estimates that 15% of girls and 5% of boys experience some form of sexual
abuse before the age of 16.</p><p>In February 2017, the Government published its Tackling
Child Sexual Exploitation: Progress Report and announced a £40m package of measures
to protect children and young people from sexual abuse, exploitation and trafficking,
and to crack down on offenders. In September 2018, the Government announced an additional
£21.5m investment in law enforcement to reduce the volume of offending and pursue
the most hardened and dangerous abusers.</p><p>The Government has made significant
progress in tackling child sexual exploitation. We have prioritised child sexual abuse
as a national threat to empower law enforcement to tackle these crimes, developed
world-leading technology such as the child abuse image database (CAID) to tackle online
child sexual abuse, and built the capabilities of our law enforcement and intelligence
partners to bring the highest-harm offenders to justice.</p><p>The Government continue
to engage closely with a range of partners including law enforcement, charities and
academics to build our understanding of the evolving threat in order to do all we
can to protect children and stop offenders.</p><p>In 2017 the government established
the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse with £7.5 million of funding. Headed
by Barnardo’s, the centre works to improve our understanding of the scale and nature
of pathways into child sexual offending and what works to prevent and tackle it, including
developing a typology of child sexual offending which will support a more targeted
response by the police and other agencies.</p><p>We will publish a national strategy
setting out how we will galvanise local, national and international efforts to prevent,
tackle and respond to all forms of Child Sexual Abuse, which will be supported by
the announcement on 4 September 2019 of an additional £30 million to safeguard children
from child sexual exploitation and abuse. Increasing funding for cutting-edge technology
and the best intelligence and law enforcement capabilities will enable police officers
to continue to target the worst and most sophisticated offenders.</p>
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