CHILDREN are our future. They are also desperately vulnerable.

It is deeply worrying, therefore, to see further evidence that child abuse or neglect may be on the rise.

Figures in North Yorkshire suggest such offences increased by seven per cent last year. Across the country, they have soared 75 per cent in ten years.

Some of this may be because we are now better at detecting abuse.

But it is a cause for real concern that as a nation we seem to be failing our children so abjectly.