MOSCOW, October 16 (RIA Novosti) - More child sexual abuse cases will be uncovered, as the scale of sexual assaults among children is larger than it was previously imagined, Norfolk police chief constable Simon Bailey said.
"We don't know for sure. But I think it's tens of thousands of victims [a year] of an appalling crime," Bailey said in an interview with the Guardian on Wednesday.
Bailey called on teachers, social workers and doctors to be more attentive to children in order to detect sexual abuse cases as early as possible to help children in trouble.
"Children will be known to their GP, known to their teachers, and it's those professions' responsibility, in my view, if they have a concern that a child might be the subject of abuse, to flag that up and share their concerns," the newspaper quoted Bailey as saying.
The chief constable's comments come as British police are shaken from a series of child sexual abuse cases. The police are being blamed for turning a blind eye to the problem and being unable to protect children from sexual assaults that have been happening in Rotherham over a 16-year period.
In August, it was uncovered that a gang had been molesting and terrorizing young children in Rotherham for almost two decades, and the police was ignoring this fact. About 1,400 children are victims of the gang.
Similar cases have been recently uncovered in other parts of Britain.
