| Abstract: | High-profile child murders lead parents to fear for their children’ssafety, but perception of risk is often at variance with reality.We explore the numbers of potential ‘Extra-familial’child homicide assailants in the United Kingdom and estimatetheir actual murder rate to determine risk levels. A South ofEngland study, equivalent to a 4 per cent sample of the UK population,of a decade of consecutive child homicides identified the characteristicsof child homicide assailants, finding that the most frequentassailants—the ‘Intra-familial’—werevery different from ‘Extra-familial’ assailants.‘Extra-familial’ killers were all males, aged nineteento forty-two, with convictions for Violent-Multi-Criminal-Child-Sex-Abuse(VMCCSA) offences and Multi-Criminal-Child-Sex-Abuse (MCCSA),whose victims were aged seven-plus years. Projecting these characteristicsonto the male UK population enables us to estimate the numbersof potential UK ‘Extra-familial’ assailants, whichare set against known UK child (five to fourteen) homicides(WHO, 2005). To account for any ‘hidden’ child homicides,deaths in the ‘undetermined’ violent death category,designated ‘Other External Cause’ (OEC), are calculatedto provide a ‘maximum’ child homicide rate. Therewere potentially 912 VMCCSA and 886 MCCSA ‘Extra-familial’offenders in the United Kingdom, who could be responsible forthe WHO-reported UK three-year average of ‘Extra-family’fifteen child homicide and seventeen OEC deaths per annum; ahomicide rate of 12,061 per million (pm) for VMCCSA and 3,386pm for MCSA, which is 1.21 and 0.34 per cent; however, the VMCCSAhomicide rate was 403 times greater than the all children accidentand cancer death rates. Though the vast majority of these potentialassailants did not kill, comparatively, they are extremely dangerous.Practice and ethical issues are debated, which considers activeoutreach for the ‘treatable’ to possible ‘reviewable’custodial sentences for the VMCCSA. |
