The National Child Protection Authority received more than a thousand complaints of child abuse in each of the past two months, the authority says.
Attorney-at-Law Sajeewani Abeykoon, Director of Law Enforcement at the NCPA, told NewsFirst that complaints usually range between 600 and 800 a month, but that June and July saw a surge past 1,000. The increase was predominantly cases of child abandonment.
Abeykoon said 4,950 complaints were recorded up to July last year, and that the figure has risen to 5,687 over the same period this year.
A caution for the school holidays
With school holidays under way, Abeykoon urged parents to take steps to protect children from domestic abuse and to exercise extra caution in what she described as a digital era.
Asked how misbehaving children should be disciplined, she said parents should use methods that preserve a child’s dignity and self-respect rather than physical punishment, and pointed parents to Shiksa, a book published by the NCPA’s mental health unit.
Children can contact the authority independently and confidentially 24 hours a day in three languages through the 1929 hotline. Abeykoon asked that the line be used responsibly and that false complaints be avoided.
How the figures compare
The NCPA said on August 14, through the same official, that it receives between 600 and 1,000 complaints a month — a range that reads as a compression of the baseline and surge figures given here.
The seven-month total of 5,687 sits close to the 5,523 complaints for the first six months of 2026 that Minister of Women and Child Affairs Saroja Savithri Paulraj reported to Parliament in July. Taken together the two counts would imply a July total far below 1,000, so they are unlikely to be measured on the same basis. The NCPA has not published a reconciliation or a category breakdown.
