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‘Child abuse in UK massively covered up’

UK

A rights campaigner in the UK says child abuse is massively covered up in the country.

“We believe in the UK at the moment a massive cover-up in every area involving child abuse that goes pretty much right to the top,” said Chris Wittwer, campaigner with the UK & Ireland Database in an interview with Press TV.

Wittwer said, “Several lords and MPs have been put in the frame for abusing children, no arrests have been made.”

The campaigner referred to “massive pedophile rings” and thousands of child abuse cases in the country over the past years, adding, “For the last 10 years I’ve been naming and shaming the pedophiles on my website in the UK in child abuses.”

His comments follow a report by the Inspectorate of Constabulary which took a sample of 600 inquiries and found that over a third of abused children were not looked at to a good enough standard.

Dru Sharpling, who headed the inspection said, "We found limited evidence that the police listened to children, and poor attitudes towards vulnerable children persisted in some teams, we also found that investigations were often inadequate, with insufficient action taken to disrupt and apprehend some perpetrators." The figures were much worse when it came to investigating online abuse where it found that in a national sample of 124 cases were not investigated properly.

The police’s national spokesman on child protection, Chief Constable Simon Bailey, said “The scale of child sexual abuse is staggering. By the end of 2015, we anticipate that police will be investigating over 70,000 cases of child sexual abuse, an increase of 88 per cent from 2012. We have got to fundamentally change our approach to policing so that our absolute focus is on working proactively with other agencies to protect the public from harm committed on or offline.”

The report has criticized the police force for its target driven policing which many feel means the protection of children are not put first and that there needs to be an overhaul in the way police deal with cases of child sexual abuse.

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