Seven percent of Polish teenagers have experienced sexual abuse during their childhood, and a significant proportion of them have fallen victim to paedophiles operating online, the Empowering Children Foundation has said.
Attempts to estimate the scale of sexual exploitation of children via the internet are hampered by the fact that a significant number of such cases are not reported, the foundation said.
It added that sexual violence can take different forms, including cases with no physical contact such as watching the child in the bath, verbal forms of harassment and encouraging contact with pornographic content.
The foundation's head, Monika Sajkowska, said: “More and more children declare that they have been unwillingly exposed to the intimate parts of another person's body.”
She added: “This kind of exhibitionism can happen in real-life relationships, but very often it also happens because a child is forced to watch such images on the internet.”
Research conducted by the organisation shows that nearly half of the parents of children aged 5 to 12 have not taken any action to protect them from sexual abuse. Adults primarily failed to have a conversation that would help the child recognise the threat and oppose unwanted actions.
Experts have said that children are not competent enough to correctly assess the intentions of an aggressor and tend to trust adults.
Around 1,100 crimes of sexual intercourse with a person under 15 were recorded in 2016, down from over 1,500 such cases five years earlier, according to police statistics.
(aba/gs)
Source: Dziennik