Police officer speaking to a mother and daughter

The Data Insights Hub

Instant access to local and national data on child sexual abuse in England and Wales.

The Data Insights Hub is our new interactive dashboard designed to enable professionals, commissioners and researchers to find, understand and use official data on child sexual abuse.

Using interactive maps and charts, the Data Insights Hub displays helpful official data from local authorities and police forces, alongside up-to-date estimates on the scale of child sexual abuse, all in one place.

As well as providing insights into the prevalence and identification of child sexual abuse, it includes information on the number of local support services available for children who have been abused and their families.

 

By providing more ways to interrogate and understand local practice in the identification of and response to child sexual abuse, the Data Insights Hub can empower you to not just to ask better questions about child sexual abuse but, also, inform future decision making with the children and families you might work with.

Visit the Data Insights Hub

Click the link below to build your understanding of child sexual abuse, both locally and across England and Wales.

Learn more about the Data Insights Hub

Find out more about how to use the Data Insights Hub and what the data might mean for your local area, with our helpful Q&As below.

Laptop with the Data Insights Hub landing page on it's screen

The Data Insights Hub is an interactive online dashboard designed by the Centre of expertise on child sexual abuse (CSA Centre). Click on the link to access local data on child sexual abuse in England and Wales.

It uses interactive maps and charts to display data providing insights into prevalence and identification of child sexual abuse, all in one place.

Using the Data Insights Hub, you can:

  • View the number of recorded concerns and reports of child sexual abuse in each part of England and Wales according to local authority and police data in 2022/23.
  • Select a local authority or police force and compare local data on child sexual abuse. You can compare this data alongside similar areas, national average data and past data on recorded child sexual abuse going back a decade.
  • See the estimated scale of child sexual abuse in each local area of England and Wales, based on survey and population data.

In each of these areas, you can also view data on the estimated number of children likely to be experiencing child sexual abuse in your ‘local iceberg’.

After selecting a local authority or police force, the Data Insights Hub allows you to create a tailored version of the CSA Centre’s iceberg infographic, with data from that area alongside the estimated number of children who are abused there each year. Alongside this, you can also see the number of support services for children in that area. This visual helps to show a clear picture of the levels of children identified in that area, as the tip of the iceberg, in comparison to the levels estimated to be experiencing abuse each year.

The Data Insights Hub displays official data from statutory services and data gathered by the CSA Centre.

The official data sources include annual data from local authority children’s services, released by the Department for Education in England, and the Welsh Government in Wales, and the police, released by the Home Office.

As well as official data from statutory services, the Data Insights Hub provides two other data points from two other sources:

  • Estimated prevalence of child sexual abuse: based on the rates of all forms of sexual abuse reported in the Child maltreatment survey published in 2011, and the estimated child population in each area in England and Wales according to the ONS.
  • Number of services that address child sexual abuse: This data is taken from the CSA Centre’s 2024 Support Matters research, a comprehensive study highlighting the current landscape of service provision in response to child sexual abuse in England & Wales.

Visit the Data Insights Hub to learn more about how we gathered and analysed this data.

Note to policing professionals: The data provided in the Data Insights Hub on child sexual abuse offences will differ from the figures and analysis shared directly with police forces by the Hydrant Programme/CSE Taskforce and the Vulnerability Knowledge and Practice Programme (VKPP).  The data and analysis provided by Hydrant Programme/ CSE Taskforce and VKPP is drawn from quarterly analysis of crime reporting direct from police forces. An overarching analysis of this data is published and although the local data is shared with police forces, this data is not published. The data included in the CSA Centre Data Insights Hub is drawn from the official published Home Office data, as described above.

The Data Insights Hub is free to use and open to all to access. It is designed to be used by anyone with a role in identifying, responding to, protecting and supporting children impacted by child sexual abuse.

This includes professionals across social work, policing, health, and the voluntary sector, those working in policy, commissioning, funding and practice roles. The Hub is designed to build understanding of the local response in the context of the scale of child sexual abuse across England and Wales and is likely to benefit many professional groups.

The Data Insights Hub also serves as a useful tool to anyone else who would like to improve their knowledge of data on child sexual abuse, such as academics or researchers.

We estimate that at least half a million children are sexually abused in England and Wales each year, but only a small fraction of this abuse comes to the attention of statutory services. Official data shows that child sexual abuse is under-identified in all local areas.

To unpick this, the Data Insights Hub provides more ways to interrogate and understand local practice in protecting and supporting children and families. When using it, you should consider the following to better understand and make use of the data:

  • A larger amount of recorded child sexual abuse means that professionals in the area have identified more abuse. It doesn’t directly mean that more abuse has occurred. It can suggest that professionals in that local area are better equipped, trained, or more experienced in spotting child sexual abuse. However, increased identification could also indicate that more abuse is happening.
  • Lower numbers of recorded child sexual abuse in one area do not directly mean that less abuse has occurred. In areas where recorded child sexual abuse is very low, it is much more likely that the number of children who have not been identified remains high. We know that far more children are sexually abused than are identified by official agencies.
  • Support services vary in size and the support they offer. The Data Insights Hub displays the number of child sexual abuse services available in each local area. Some services might offer support to large numbers of service users, and some might only have capacity to work with smaller numbers of service users. So, the overall number of services will not always reflect the amount of support on offer.

It is important to consider that the amount of recorded child sexual abuse in official data is very unlikely to match the actual scale of abuse children experience, and this data cannot provide you with firm answers about whether an area is performing better or worse in terms of identifying and protecting children. Closing this gap is very important if we want to improve protection and support for children when sexual abuse does happen.

 

 

Yes. The Data Insights Hub enables stakeholders to find, understand and use official data on child sexual abuse to explore how local safeguarding agencies and commissioned services are meeting the needs of victims and survivors, and what might need to change.

It is designed to make local data on child sexual abuse easily accessible, comparisons to the national context easy and an understanding of local areas of identification rates and support easy to find.

Low rates of identified child sexual abuse can suggest that professional knowledge, skills and confidence in identifying and responding to children at risk of abuse is low in a certain area. Therefore, it can also serve as an important tool in indicating where more specific training or focus on child sexual abuse is most needed by professionals.

The Data Insights Hub is also a useful tool to encourage and enable multi-agency working by allowing professionals from across agencies to view the entire local picture of child sexual abuse, to see how each agency can support each other in improving identification and pinpoint where further collaboration is essential.

Yes, the Data Insights Hub can be used to determine where there is need for greater provision of support following child sexual abuse. It also displays data from the CSA Centre’s Support Matters research, which revealed significant differences in the availability of support following childhood sexual abuse depending on where you live in England and Wales.

The Data Insights Hub displays how many support services for children who have been sexually abused are available in each local authority or police force area. This means professionals and commissioners will be able to learn more about support provision across all areas of the country and help them discover where enhanced support provision is needed most.

Useful research and resources