Growing up watched

A fifth of children aged 10 to 15 believe it very or quite likely that they will see people involved in gangs in their local area, according to new data from the redesigned Children’s Crime Survey for England and Wales (CCSEW), published by the Office for National Statistics earlier this week.

Now conducted online rather than face-to-face, the survey questioned 6,031 children about their experiences from December 2024 through to February 2026.

It found that 9 per cent of children were worried a lot or a fair amount about gangs in their local area, and 25 per cent thought it likely that people carry weapons nearby. This figure climbed steeply with age.

Among 15-year-olds, 11 per cent thought it very likely people carry weapons locally, and a further 25 per cent thought it quite likely, against just 4 per cent and 9 per cent respectively among 10-year-olds.

Actual weapon-carrying among children remained rare, at one per cent overall, though more common among boys (1.1 per cent) than girls (0.4 per cent) and, again, rising sharply with age, from 0.4 per cent at 11 to 1.5 per cent at 15. Around 1 in 10 children (10 per cent) thought it very or quite likely they could personally be attacked by someone with a weapon, and 15 per cent said they were worried a lot or a fair amount about weapon-carrying in their area over the past year.

Direct exposure to violence was more common still. Sixty-nine per cent of children said they had seen or heard about a fight or other physical violence between their peers in the last 12 months, rising from 48 per cent among 10-year-olds to 77 per cent among 15-year-olds; a quarter of those said they had witnessed this “very or fairly often”.

Separately, 28 per cent of children said they had seen someone threatened, hurt or assaulted without a weapon in their local area, and 5 per cent had witnessed an assault involving a weapon — again both rising steeply with age, from 17 per cent and 3 per cent respectively among 10-year-olds to 36 per cent and 8 per cent among 15-year-olds.

Among children who expressed any worry about gangs or weapons locally, around a third said they avoided certain places (32 per cent), avoided travelling alone (31 per cent) or avoided going out at certain times (31 per cent) as a result — a fear-of-crime effect with obvious implications for neighbourhood policing, reassurance strategies and schools’ community-safety messaging.

Safeguarding and online sexual exploitation

Twelve per cent of 13- to 15-year-olds received at least one sexual message in the past year — 13 per cent of girls against 10% of boys, rising with age from 7 per cent among 13-year-olds to 16 per cent among 15-year-olds.

Of those who received such messages, most (71 per cent) said they came from someone about their own age, but almost a quarter (24 per cent) came from someone a few years older but still under 18, and nearly one in five (19 per cent) came from an adult aged 18 or over. Girls were markedly more exposed to older senders: 31 per cent received messages from someone a few years older but under 18 (against 15 per cent of boys), and a quarter from an adult (against 12 per cent of boys).

A quarter of children who received sexual messages (25 per cent) had received more than ten in the past year, most commonly by private message (87 per cent, rising to 92 per cent among 15-year-olds). Two-thirds of recipients (68 per cent) considered the messages unwanted — 84 per cent of girls against 49 per cent of boys — yet only 53 per cent told anyone about it, a disclosure gap that speaks directly to ongoing debates over reporting routes and trusted-adult access for online child sexual exploitation.

A smaller proportion, 2 per cent of 13- to 15-year-olds, said they had sent a sexual message themselves in the last year; of these, 31 per cent had sent more than ten, and 11 per cent said an image or message had been shared or shown to someone else without their agreement — a figure that touches directly on offences under the Sexual Offences Act and image-based abuse provisions forces are increasingly dealing with in this age group.

Exposure to harmful content

Exposure to harmful content online was widespread among 13- to 15-year-olds: 48per cent had seen a lot or a fair amount of hateful content targeted at people with protected characteristics, 19 per cent had seen content encouraging eating disorders, 15per cent had seen sexual images or videos, and 12per cent had seen content showing or encouraging self-harm. The majority of this exposure — between 80 per cent and 88 per cent depending on content type — was described as unintentional rather than sought out.

Girls reported higher exposure to most harmful content types: 21 per cent saw a lot of hateful content against 17 per cent of boys, and 10 per cent saw a lot of content encouraging eating disorders against just 3 per cent of boys, with girls more than twice as likely to have actively searched for such content (16 per cent versus 7 per cent). Boys, by contrast, were more likely to have seen a lot of sexual content (5 per cent versus 3per cent) and to have searched for it (18 per cent versus 11 per cent).

More broadly, 37 per cent of all 10- to 15-year-olds said they had seen violent or criminal content online in the past year, most commonly fights or physical violence between people (34per cent). Boys were somewhat more likely than girls to have seen content rewarding risky or violent behaviour (8 per cent versus 6per cent), tutorials on illegal activity (6per cent versus 4 per cent) or adverts recruiting into violent or criminal groups (3per cent versus 2 per cent).

Underpinning all of this is a heavily online childhood: 84 per cent of children spent three or more hours online on an average weekend day, a quarter (25 per cent) spent seven hours or more, and 88 per cent went online via a smartphone. Encouragingly, 89 per cent had received some information on staying safe online in the past year, most often from school (95 per cent) rather than parents (62 per cent).

The ONS stresses these are provisional figures from a newly redesigned survey, not directly comparable with the previous face-to-face CCSEW given the change in both design and mode of data collection.

However, as a first snapshot from the redesigned methodology, they offer forces and safeguarding partners a fresh, if provisional, baseline on how children perceive and experience risk, both on the street and online.