One in four children are victims of crime in the UK

A quarter of children are technically the victims of crime according to the latest study

Childhood is supposed to be a innocent and carefree time, yet the latest British Crime Survey has found that a shocking one in four children are the victims of crime, compared with just 6% of adults. Most of the 2.1 million incidents of theft and violence against young people were playground fights or family rows.

However the figures have been criticised for including minor incidents such as toys being broken, and when asked whether the victims considered the incident to be a crime, the figure fell to 404,000.

Of the 643,000 incidents that occurred outside of school, almost 85% involved violence of some kind.

The findings also confirmed that boys are nearly twice as likely to be victims of serious personal crime such as mugging than girls, with those living in the 20% most deprived areas most at risk.

Nick Herbert, the Police minister said it was important not to ‘criminalise' the everyday experiences of young people.

‘We need a commonsense approach that recognises young people's experiences so that we don't criminalise children by failing to properly distinguish between playground spats and serious crime' he said.

‘However you look at these statistics, they reveal what people know only too well - that crime affecting young people is a serious problem which must be tackled.'

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