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| Stay Safe Stamp Image from Shutterstock |
When I was a kid at school, this was the talk that happened at least once a year. The stranger danger talk, the warning about lone dodgy looking men waiting outside school in cars, offering you sweets if you got in.
But how realistic is this and how often are children abducted or abused because they were approached in this way? Surely, danger is just danger? A person does not have to be a stranger to be dangerous to your child. We know that - fathers abuse, mothers abuse, neighbours abuse, grandparents abuse. It is a really sad fact of life. According to Dosomething.org 90% of child abusers are known to the child in some way and 68% are abused by a family member (Source).
Gosh, those statistics make me want to be physically sick. I'm now sat here wondering why on earth I googled on this subject but I can't just push it under the carpet and pretend it doesn't happen. The findings from the NSPCC state there are over 50,000 children identified in the UK as needing protection from abuse and that really makes me realise just how serious this problem is. Sadly, the true picture is probably many, many times worse than this as they believe for every identified child there is another eight suffering in silence.