You Are Not as Alone as It Has Felt

You are not as alone as it has felt.

Nearly one in three adults in England and Wales experienced some form of childhood abuse before the age of eighteen. That is 13.6 million people—according to the most recent Crime Survey for England and Wales.

But statistics can count people. They cannot hold them.

In this episode we look at what the data actually shows about the lifetime prevalence of childhood abuse — and more importantly, what it doesn't and can't capture about what it means to live inside those numbers as an adult.

This episode covers childhood abuse, long-term mental health outcomes, and the gap between official data and lived experience. Please take care of yourself as you listen.

If anything in this episode brought something up for you, support is available 24/7. Call or text 988, text HOME to 741741, or contact NAPAC at 0808 801 0331—a free support line for adult survivors of childhood abuse.

Sources:

Primary Data Sources 

Office for National Statistics — Abuse during childhood in England and Wales: March 2024 (published November 2025) 

NAPAC — Key Facts and Figures 2025 — napac.org.uk/key-facts-figures
 CSA Centre — Child sexual abuse in 2023-24: Trends in official data (March 2025) 

Peer-Reviewed Research 

Hailes et al.—Long-term outcomes of childhood sexual abuse: an umbrella review—The Lancet Psychiatry (2019) 

Cleece & Hill — Sexual abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder in childhood, adolescence and young adulthood — Journal of Family & Child Health (2025) 

1958 British Birth Cohort — Child maltreatment associations with developmental trajectories and long-term outcomes — PMC (2020) 

Latiff et al.—A systematic review of factors associated with disclosure of child sexual abuse—Child Abuse & Neglect (2024) 

Crisis Resources — Include in Every Episode Description 

Call or text 988—Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (24/7, free, confidential)
 Text HOME to 741741—Crisis Text Line (24/7, free, confidential)
 NAPAC — 0808 801 0331 — Free support line for adult survivors of childhood abuse 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:02

I want to ask you something before we begin. Think about the people in your life, your friends, your family, the people you grew up with, the people you work with, the people you pass on the streets every day. Now can consider this. Nearly one in three of them experienced abuse before the age of eighteen. Not somewhere else, not in extreme circumstances here in this country, in ordinary lives in ordinary homes. Today we are going to look at what the data actually shows and more importantly what it does not and cannot show. Before we go any further, a reminder that today's episode covers childhood abuse. If that's something you're carrying, please take care of yourself as you listen. The crisis resources are in the show notes and I'll read them at the end of every episode. You don't have to listen to this alone. This is episode two, the data, the reality and the gap between them. It is the experience of sitting in a room full of people, a classroom, a waiting room, a family gathering, and feeling completely, utterly alone in what you are carrying. As if what happened to you was so rare, so unusual, so outside the normal range of human experience that no one around you could possibly understand it. I want to start today by dismantling that feeling. Not because what you experienced wasn't significant, it was, it is. But because the idea that you are alone in this, that it happened to you and almost nobody else is one of the most damaging myths that survivors carry, and the data tells a very different story. The data shows that childhood abuse is not rare, it is not exceptional, it is something that happens to a small, unfortunate minority. It is devastatingly common, and the adults living with its aftermath are all around us. Before we go into the numbers, I want to name something important. Statistics about abuse are complicated, they are collected imperfectly, they are reportedly reported inconsistently and they almost always undercount the reality because most abuse is never reported at all. So everything I share today comes from the best available UK data, primarily the crime survey for England and Wales, the Office for National Statistics and Peer Reviewed Research. I'll name my sources in these show notes. Whether data is contested or uncertain I'll tell you, where I'm drawing a distinction between what we know and what we can reasonably infer. I'll make that clear. That's the part of this episode I care most about. Let's start with the headline figure. According to the most recent crime survey for England and Wales, published by the Office for National Statistics in 2025, 29% of adults aged 18 and over experienced at least one form of child abuse before the age of 18. That is 13.6 million people in England and Wales alone. Let me put that in human terms. If you failed Rembrandt Stadium to capacity ninety thousand people, roughly twenty six thousand of them would be carrying the long-term aftermath of childhood abuse every time every event. That is not a rare experience, that is the crowd around you. Now these categories are not mutually exclusive. Many survivors experienced more than one form of abuse. The thirteen point six million total figure accounts for that overlap. Now here is where it gets important. These are the people who are willing and able to report it in a survey. The actual numbers are almost certainly higher. The under reporting gap self-reported cases of child maltreatment are 7 to 17 times greater than official recorded statistics. 72% of adults who experienced sexual abuse as a child did not tell anyone at the time of the abuse. Only 10 to 15% of sexual offences are ever reported to the police, and that is from the Science Direct Systematic Review 2023. It is an enormous silence. And within that silence there is a particular pattern worth naming. Not a parent, not a teacher, not a friend, nobody. The weight of silence disclosure data average time from abuse ending to first disclosure twenty two years. For men specifically twenty five point seven years for women twenty point six years NAPAC data from the moment abuse stops, survivors take an average of twenty two years to disclose. Between 2019 and 2024, over 1,500 survivors trusted NAPAC with their first ever disclosure. 22 years of carrying it alone. For men that figure is even higher, an average of nearly 26 years. I want you to sit with that number because it tells us something that the headline statistics don't. It tells us about the rate of silence, the years of not having the language or the safety or the belief that anyone would understand or that anything would change if they did. 22 years is not a short time for many people, it is most of their adult life. Now I want to talk about what happens after because the statistics I've shared so far about what happens what happened in childhood, but this show and this episode is about what it means to live with it as an adult. And the research here is consistent and significant. Long term outcomes, the Lancet Psychiatry Umbrella Review. Five hundred and fifty-nine primary studies, over four million participants. Childhood sexual abuse was associated with 26 out of 28 specific long-term outcomes measured. These included depression, anxiety, PTSD, complex PTSD, eating disorders, substance misuse, self-harm and the rings of physical health conditions. Approximately two-thirds of people who experience childhood sexual abuse are estimated to experience significant mental or emotional difficulties as a result. In plain language, the effects of childhood abuse do not stay in childhood. They move through time with the person who experienced them. They show up in the body, in the nervous system, in relationships, in the way a person experiences the world decades later. Lifetime Persistence nineteen fifty eight British Birth Cohort A landmark study following people born in nineteen fifty eight across their entire lives, emotional, physical and sexual abuse were all associated with poorer emotional health throughout childhood, with most of those associations persisting to age fifty. Age fifty, not a temporary effect, a live course reality associations for abuse and mental health did not entirely explain later mental health at age forty five, suggesting unstead of poor mental health in midlife can occur regardless of earlier status. I want to be careful here about something. These statistics describe associations and elevated risk. They do not describe certainty or destiny. Not every survivor of childhood abuse develops long-term mental health conditions. Resilience is real, recovery is real. The brain's capacity to adapt is real. But the weight of evidence is clear. The long term mental health impact of childhood abuse is significant, common and persistent. And it is still dramatically underestimated by the systems that are supposed to help. Now I want to talk about what the data doesn't show. Because statistics, by their nature, abstractions, they take something vast and complicated and human and they reduce it to a number. And numbers, however accurate, cannot capture certain things. They cannot capture what it is what it is like to grow up in a home where love and harm come from the same source. They cannot capture the particular confusion of a child who is told that what is happening is normal or their fault or not happening at all. They cannot capture the years of not knowing what that what you experienced had a name that other people had experienced something similar. That the way your nervous system responds to the world is not a personal feeling. It is a logical response to what you lived through. Statistics cannot capture the experience of sitting across from a therapist who has never experienced what you have and trying to explain something that lives in your body, not just your memory. They cannot capture the cost of carrying it quietly for 22 years, what that does to a person, what it costs in relationships, in trust, in the ordinary experience of feeling safe in the world. And they cannot capture what it means to still be here, still functioning, still showing up, still and in some cases still trying to understand it decades later. What the numbers show and what they cannot The data counts 13.6 million people. It cannot hold any of any one of them. Research cannot measure the years before a name existed for what happened, the cost of silence across two decades, the daily work of functioning inside a nervous system shaped by experiences in nervous shows NAPAC most survivors describe a significant gap between the abuse ending and having language to describe it. That gap unmeasured, unnamed, is where many people live. The data tells us that 13.6 million people in England and Wales experienced childhood abuse. That is an important number, it matters. It should inform policy, funding, research and clinical practice. But the 13.6 million number does not tell you what any of those people have has been carrying, what it has cost them, what they have built in spite of it, what they still haven't been able to say out loud. The data can count the people, it cannot hold them. One of the things that shifted for me, not fixed but shifted, it was the understanding the concept of normalization in the context of trauma. Normalization is what happens when a child grows up inside harmful experiences because a child has no frame of reference. They don't know what other people's homes feel like, they don't know what the safety what safety is supposed to feel like, so the brain does the only thing it can. It normalizes the experience, it makes it ordinary, it integrates it as just the way things are. This is not weakness, this is survival. But it also means that many survivors spend years, sometimes decades, not recognizing what happened to them as abuse, not because they're in denial, but because their nervous system integrated it as normal before they had the cognitive tools to evaluate it. Normalization what the research shows Among survey respondents describing the childhood of sexual abuse, around two thirds said they had not told anyone at the time. When respondents did not tell someone they were much more likely to tell a family member than a professional. Only one in 15 cases of contact sexual abuse were reported to the police at the time. This pattern reflects normalization, not denial. Children mitigate their experience as ordinary. The disclosure gap is the gap between experience and language. Understanding that, really understanding really understanding it changed something for me. It made sense of the silence, the confusion, the twenty two years. It didn't make it make any of it okay. Nothing makes it okay, but it made it comprehensible and comprehensibility is the beginning of something. If any of this episode has resonated with something you've been trying to make sense of, I'd encourage you to sit with it. You don't have to resolve it, you just have to let it be real. That number is not abstract to me. It never will be. I am one of them, and I know from everything I've read and studied and lived that most of those 13.6 million people are still carrying something, still making sense of it, still asking why. I'm not going to tell you it gets easier. I don't know if that's true for everyone. What I will say is this: you are not as alone as it has felt. The data proves it. Even if the data can't hold you. Next episode, we're going to look at where CBT came from, the origins of cognitive behavioral therapy, what it was originally designed to do, and the questions worth asking about how it's been applied since. But for now that's enough. That's not fixed, still here, episode two. If anything in today's episode brought something up for you, please reach out for support. You can call or text 988 the Suicide and Crisis Live line for a free confidential conversation with a trained counsellor available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Or you can text home to 741 741 to reach the crisis text line. Also free, confidential and available anytime. You can also find this show wherever you listen to podcasts. If today's episode meant something to you, please share it with someone who might need it. I'm Torren, I'll be back for episode three. Take care of yourself.