Child sexual abuse and exploitation material has drawn concern and legislative attention since the turn of the century, and the work to identify children in the images has been a prioritised task through international cooperation. The International Child Sexual Exploitation Image Database (ICSE DB) includes more than 8000 identified victims from nearly 50 countries. The database contains considerable important information about child abuse image crimes. The general aim of this study was to quantify the characteristics of children in identified illegal images from the UK ICSE DB (n = 687) with the subsidiary aim to describe differences between cases of self‐taken images and those whose images had been taken by others. The analysis showed an increase in identified victims during the study years 2006–2015. Almost two‐thirds were female, the majority were white and 44.3 per cent of images were self‐taken (34.4% taken in a coercive and 9.9% in a non‐coercive relationship). Since 2010, the number of self‐taken images each year has exceeded more than 40 per cent of the total number of images in the database. Although self‐taken images may be perceived as less worrisome, two‐thirds were classified as coercive. This is an important argument in favour of continuing to investigate these cases under victim identification programmes.
Key Practitioner Messages
The ICSE DB includes more than 8000 identified victims and contains important information about child abuse image crimes.
A majority of the identified victims were female and white children.
Almost half of all images were self‐taken and had been taken in a coercive relationship. Parents and practitioners need to recognise that even if a child sends sexual images these should be considered worrisome and therefore investigated further.
The powers of guardianship under the 1983 Mental Health Act confer on the guardian powers to require the patient to reside in a specified place, to require attendance for treatment and to require access to the patient for appropriate health and social services personnel. This paper presents a descriptive study and analysis of the use of guardianship over a 5-year period in four geographical areas. Cases were collected retrospectively from a variety of sources and scrutinized systematically. Three cases of guardianship for mental impairment were excluded from the analysis leaving 23 patients with mental illness. All but two of the patients were female. Older patients, mostly with dementia, accounted for three-quarters of the sample and the majority of orders in this group were to require residence in an old people's home (usually with an apparently good outcome), though three were intended to facilitate home care. In most of the younger patients a functional psychiatric illness was diagnosed and powers were used to maintain the patient at home. The absence of a specific 'power to convey' needs to be resolved for elderly patients needing residential care. The use of guardianship orders to maintain older patients in the community needs further exploration.
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