School abuse claims may be ‘tip of the iceberg’, as police warn some crimes possibly covered up


Allegations of sexual assault and harassment by pupils of private schools that have exploded online in recent days may be the “tip of the iceberg”, a leading police officer has warned.

Simon Bailey, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) lead for child protection, also said he feared such abuse was being tolerated or covered up in some cases.

It comes after thousands of people posted claims of sexual assault, harassment and rape on the website Everyone’s Invited. The NPCC, Home Office and Department for Education (DfE) are working with the site’s organisers to support those making the reports.

“I think that this is the tip of the iceberg if you look at the number of testimonies that are now being recorded on the site,” Mr Bailey told The Daily Telegraph. “This is going to be the next big scandal.”

He said that some schools might be covering up attacks by their pupils, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I don’t have any evidence of that at the moment, but I think it’s a reasonable assumption.



Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes:

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>