LONDON — At least 350 people have come forward to report abuse at the hands of youth soccer coaches in Britain over the past two weeks, the police said Thursday, deepening a child sexual abuse scandal that has engulfed English soccer.
The scandal emerged last month after at least six former professional players publicly said that they had been molested as boys in youth programs. The head of the English soccer players’ union last week said that at least 20 more former players had come forward, many of them privately.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council on Thursday said that police forces had received a “significant” amount of calls since those first public revelations, and a children’s charity for victims of abuse said that a new telephone help line it had set up had received 860 calls in its first week, 60 of which were referred to the police or to social services.