We Are Failing the Nation’s Young

According to a recently released report by the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF), a government backed charity set up to investigate ways to prevent children becoming involved in violence, the number of children arrested for sexual offences in 2024-2025  hit an all-time high, rising from 3,225 in 2023, to 3,809, marking an 18% rise over the course of the year, and a 74% rise, compared with pre-Covid levels (2019/20). The report goes on to state that 98% of all such arrests in the last decade have been of boys, indicating a very real and growing problem of violence against young women and girls.   In separate research involving 11,000 children aged 13 to 17, the YEF further found that one teenager in every school class had suffered physical or sexual abuse while in a relationship, including being pressured into sex, or having explicit images shared online without their consent.

Remarkable, astonishing … appalling?  All those things.  But it is perhaps worth pointing out that between 1966-1970 the recorded age of first sexual intercourse was 17-21, in itself a massive increase on the recorded 19-23 age range that marked the 1950s, and that reflected an emerging tolerance for pre-marital sex resulting from the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s.  In other words, prior to this century, sexual intercourse below the age of 17 was an anomaly, while the idea of boys coercing girls into sex was almost unheard of.   Yet now it seems accepted that children from puberty onwards will have a relationship involving sex.

So what’s happened?  What has brought about this disturbing change, where sexual activity amongst children ‘as soon as they feel ready’ – which for some might be as young as eight – is accepted as natural, and where some boys apparently feel they have the right to demand sexual gratification?   Can it be that Relationships and Sex Education, promoted by government as a means of keeping children safe from abuse and exploitation, is actually encouraging the very thing it’s designed to stop – inspiring not just premature sexual activity, but violence and deviant behaviour?  And to what extent has such teaching impacted children to ‘explore’ their sexuality more generally, encouraging them to identify as gay, non-binary, or gender dysphoric?

The truth, for all the hype, is that such teaching is prematurely making children sexually aware, filling their brains with information that, both emotionally and intellectually, they are unable to process.  After all, does a three year-old child really need to learn they might have been born in the wrong body?  Does a five year-old need to learn about consent?  And at age eleven, do girls need to be encouraged to have a contraceptive implant?

Far from guarding children against abuse and exploitation, the insistence that they learn in detail the mechanics of sex, both heterosexual and gay, at an age when such matters wouldn’t naturally occur, can only encourage confusion.  Small wonder children feel entitled to experiment and then misapply what they have learnt!

We condemn, with shocked horror, the rise in child-on-child sexual abuse and assault – but it’s we who are the real abusers.  Adults, seeking to validate their own life-style choices and aberrant behaviour, have imposed onto children knowledge from which they should have been protected.  We have forced open Pandora’s box – how can we be surprised that all the miseries and evils of the world have flooded out?

The truth is, the legal age of consent may still be 16, but as a society we are encouraging sexual exploration and promiscuity – including practices that only a couple of decades ago would have been labelled deviant – amongst children from day one of their education.  We talk about protecting children from the harmful effects of social media, but the rot goes far beyond that.  To protect the nation’s young, we need to teach them once again the values of purity, chastity, self-worth, commitment … of respecting both themselves and others.  We need to teach them that sex is special and not something to be indulged in casually.  And parents need to model to their children that faithfulness and love which holds the family together, providing for their children a stable and secure base, where they can grow up safely and go out to face a sometimes frightening world.