More than 500 children a day are becoming victims of thefts and muggings but the crimes are not being reported to police amid fears of reprisals, new figures suggest.

The number of children being robbed of their mobile phones has risen since 2017 after successive years of decline with increasingly valuable smartphones and cuts in police officers being blamed.

However, just one one in eight children aged 10 to 15 (13 per cent) report the thefts to police, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Criminologists attributed their reluctance to fears of revenge attacks if they reported thieves and a belief that police are too stretched to investigate such high-volume “low-level” crimes.

They blamed the thefts on the surge in smartphones as children sought to remain connected to social media and the pressures on policing with 21,000 officer posts cut since 2010. Only seven per cent of robbery cases result in a suspect being charged compared with 21 percent four years ago.