Child sexual abuse in the UK is soaring, police have said, with 1,000 paedophile suspects being arrested each month and the number of children being rescued from harm rising by 50% in the last five years.
The National Crime Agency said the growth in offending across the UK was driven by technology and linked to the radicalisation of offenders in online forums, encouraging people to view images of child sexual abuse by reassuring them it was normal.
Most contact with children happened on mainstream social media platforms, with algorithms pushing paedophilic material to people who have shown a previous interest in it.
The significant increase in every measure “really worries us”, said Rob Jones, the NCA’s director general of operations.
Leads about people interested in sexually abusing children had risen tenfold in a decade, he said, with 1,200 children a month being safeguarded.
If you want a real answer it’s likely mostly because humans only recently became “civilised” as far as our evolutionary past is concerned.
For our entire history before that, it has been evolutionarily advantageous to breed as early as biologically possible.
These genetics still exist and having attraction to minors still haunts humanity. Some studies show very large numbers of adults, in the realm of 10-25% of the population, are attracted to minors. Usually the definition is below the age of consent in the country of the study.
Almost all of these people understand it’s wrong and do not pursue these unwanted feelings. When people have overlaps between psychopathy, trauma or other conditions and the attraction to minors they often become offenders.