Emotional abuse: statistics briefing
How many children experience emotional abuse?
Signs of emotional abuse may go unnoticed by adults in a child's or young person’s life.
It's difficult to measure exactly how many children in the UK experience emotional abuse. However, research with 2,275 young people aged 11-17 about their experiences of emotional abuse suggests around 1 in 15 children in the UK have been emotionally abused.1
This briefing looks at what data and statistics are available to help professionals, and the organisations they work for, make evidence-based decisions about emotional abuse.
It includes information from a number of sources such as data from services which work with children and research into children's and adults' self-reported experiences, which help build up a picture of the scale of emotional abuse.
Key findings from the data
- Most child abuse includes an element of emotional abuse, but it is recorded as a specific concern for over 1 in 3 children who are the subject of a child protection plan or on a child protection register in the UK.
- There were over 7,000 contacts to the NSPCC’s Helpline and over 2,700 Childline counselling sessions in 2022/23 about emotional abuse.
- There were over 61,000 police-recorded offences related to emotional abuse in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 2022/23. Data was not available for Scotland.
Statistics briefings series
Statistics can help people and the organisations they work for make evidence-based decisions about how best to meet the needs of children. Our series of briefings looks at what available data can tell us about child abuse and neglect.
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