of our sixteen-to-eighteen-year-olds are in full-time education and training. This compares with seventy-seven per cent in Belgium and the Netherlands; forty-seven per cent in Italy and West Germany; and seventy-nine per cent in the USA. The British CBI - and even the High Street banks - have expressed serious reservations about the impact of student loans on the number of young people seeking higher education. And yet the CBI say the demand for graduates will increase by about four per cent per year. Some children have more pressing problems than education. Britain has 360,000 children with some form of disability: only four per cent of their families are estimated to have received any form of respite care within the previous twelve months. Child Protection Registers were established in 1974. However, the first year in which information was systematically collected was in 1989. 40,700 children were identified in England as being 'at risk' and placed on Registers. Forty-one per cent were listed because of grave concern that they might be at significant risk of abuse; 4.8 per cent had been subjected to severe emotional ill treatment or rejection; 14.4 per cent had been sexually abused; 23.9 per cent had been physically injured; 12 per cent had been persistently neglected; and a further 3.7 per cent fell into a mixture of these categories.
Our Violent Society
Perhaps we should judge the health of our society against the easy availability of pornographic material. As availability increases, so does evidence of the links between pornography and subsequent violence against women and children. During the last two years the following cases have been before British courts. A woman and her fourteen-year-old daughter were attacked by a hooded man in their home in a Suffolk village. The mother had her clothes cut off with a knife before she was raped and her daughter was indecently assaulted. At the home of the attacker they found a scrapbook containing sordid and sinister stories with a recurring theme of complete domination and defilement of women and young girls. There was a case in Lincoln involving a man who sexually abused a four-year-old girl. He was put on probation only for a year because the court was told the girl 'was extraordinarily well versed in sexual knowledge'. She had been shown pornographic videos in her home.