LAST Friday, deliveryman Chan Kok Weng, 29, was sentenced to 12 years jail for performing oral sex on a six-year-old in the toilet of a community library.
The previous week, National University of Singapore undergraduate Andy Lee, 24, whom prosecutors say sexually abused three teenage boys in Housing Board lifts, appeared in court to face charges.

And on April 24, full-time national serviceman Huang Shiyou, 22, a serial sex predator, was jailed for 32 years for sexual assault and attempted rape. He would trail young girls into lifts, threaten them with a penknife and proceed to maul them either in the lifts or in stairways nearby. His nine victims were aged from nine to 14.

Reports of children or teenagers being sexually molested are hitting the headlines with alarming regularity. Should parents be concerned? Are more sex-starved predators on the loose?

There is no way of knowing. The police have declined to give figures on sexual offences against children. The reason: the 'sensitive nature of the information', even if the information pertains only to the specific number of the crimes.

However, the police say they take a serious view of all acts of child abuse and that special efforts are taken to ensure 'proper victim care' and protection for the child.

Significantly, the Ministry for Community Development, Youth and Sports (MCYS) shared with The Straits Times recently data that may be deemed far more 'sensitive': cases of children being sexually abused, not by strangers, but by trusted family members in their own homes.

Some of these children face the risk of prolonged abuse and may even need to be removed from home.

What is worrying is that the MCYS figures showed a significant rise in the 'intra-familial' child sex abuse cases reported to it - from 15 in 2000 to about 50 last year. The proportion of sex abuse cases has also risen sharply, accounting for nearly 45 per cent of all child abuse cases reported to MCYS last year, up from around 20 per cent in 2000.

Could this mean that cases of 'extra-familial' child sex abuse - by people who are not related to the child - are also on the rise? In the absence of publicly available police data, we have no way of knowing.

A Singapore Children's Society research paper published in 2003 noted that an average of 240 sexual offences against children were registered every year between 1999 and 2002. Of these, only 16 per cent of the crimes were perpetrated by parents, relatives or other caregivers. The vast majority of the cases presumably involved people known but not related to the child or outsiders.

More recent data also seem to bear this out. A study done by medical social workers at KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH) showed that of the 93 child sex abuse cases that the hospital saw in 2007, nearly 60 per cent were perpetrated by people not related to the child.

The study looked at children aged 16 and below. Younger children were more likely to be abused, the study showed, with 39 per cent of the victims aged six years and below. The youngest victim was two years old.

Ms Eng Peng Peng, a senior medical social worker at KKH and a co-author of the report, said that in about two-thirds of the cases, the perpetrators were known but not related to the victim. It could be the kind uncle next door, a sports coach, a family friend or a bus driver.

In one case, a 14-year-old boy was sodomised by a stranger in a shopping mall toilet after being bribed with $10. In another, a nine-year-old refused to get into a lift with a stranger, letting him go first. When she took the next lift, the door opened on the second floor, the stranger got in and proceeded to molest her.

Her mother had told her not to get into lifts with strangers - and she did not. Still, she fell victim.

In the wake of such cases, it is perhaps necessary for the authorities to disclose the full extent of child sex abuse here. Interestingly, even Singapore's child protection agency - the MCYS - says it does not have data on extra-familial abuse cases.

Singapore's periodic report to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which requires governments to disclose child abuse statistics, is silent on how many child sex abuse cases have occurred. The only figures pertain to 'cases known to MCYS' or intra-familial abuse.

We also need to conduct prevalence studies - to suss out how many people in the general population have been sexually abused as children, since experts say that for every case reported at least three may go unreported.

Unicef spokesman Geoffrey Keele says that the 'number, nature and extent' of child sex abuse cases needs to be made clear so we can tailor child protection and welfare programmes better. Although being open about the number of such cases may not prevent perverts from abusing children, it will make for a more 'vigilant society', Mr Keele observes.

This, in turn, can lead to more cases being reported - and potentially greater chances of nabbing perpetrators, particularly repeat offenders.

Parents are ultimately responsible for their children's safety. But if they do not even know that a threat exists, they may well become complacent.

In the recent cases such as that of Huang the courts have signalled that perpetrators who prey on children deserve harsh penalties.

But very few cases emerge from the shame and secrecy that surrounds sex abuse to end up in court in the first place. The public needs to know how many such cases are reported to the police, how many end up in court and how many perpetrators are eventually jailed.

Otherwise, instead of protecting our children, we may unwittingly end up protecting child sex abusers instead.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.