Online child sexual abuse surges by 26% in year as police say tech firms must act | Online abuse
Online child sexual exploitation in England and Wales has risen by a quarter in a year, figures show, with police calling on social media platforms to do more to protect young people.
Staffordshire Police Chief Constable Becky Riggs has called on tech companies to use AI tools to automatically prevent inappropriate images being uploaded and shared on their sites.
Riggs, head of child protection and exploitation at the National Police Chiefs’ Council, said: “I know that these platforms, together with the technology available, can prevent these harms from occurring in the first place.”
He added that the technology children use should come with built-in protections, such as mobile phones, that allow them to only access secure platforms and websites.
Police statistics show 122,768 child sexual abuse offenses will be recorded in England and Wales in 2024; This means a 6% increase compared to the previous year. Online sexual abuse and exploitation of children increased by 26%; 51,672 crimes were recorded; this represents 42% of the total. Half of the crimes were committed by children aged 10-17, and the most common crime in this group was the sharing of indecent images (64%).
Gareth Edwards, head of the vulnerability information and enforcement program at the National Center on Violence Against Women and Girls and Public Protection, said online crime was the “fastest growing threat” – but it is difficult to establish whether this increase is due to increased reporting from platforms in anticipation of the Online Safety Act coming into force this year, or because crimes are becoming more common. He noted that other research, including from the Youth Endowment Fund, suggested they were growing.
It also noted that an emerging threat to young people was being blackmailed through “sextortion”, where predators threaten to publish sexual images of their victims, but the scale of this threat was difficult to determine, the report said.
Anna Edmundson, head of policy at the NSPCC, called on the government to launch a national prevalence study to go beyond police-recorded crimes “to deepen our understanding of how children and young people are exposed to such harm”.
Police figures show that the most frequently used platforms for reported child abuse and exploitation crimes were Snapchat (54% of reports or 11,912); WhatsApp (8% or 1,870) and Instagram (8% or 1,705) are on the rise due to message encryption, and Facebook is falling behind as the demographic ages.
Riggs said Snapchat has the “highest level of reporting” to law enforcement, while TikTok and X are examples of “less reporting,” with some platforms more proactively seeking out child sexual content to share with law enforcement.
He added: “There are some disparities around TikTok in particular, and there are probably other platforms where there may be disparities in terms of how brave and assertive they are in terms of protecting and protecting members of society, particularly children.”
The NSPCC said the publication of two reports into child sexual abuse and exploitation paints the “most comprehensive picture yet” but only one in 10 crimes is believed to be reported to police.
Riggs said: “This year’s reports make one trend clear: the rapid growth of online abuse. As more crime moves into digital spaces, we must do much more across police, government, industry and civil society to prevent harm before it reaches the child.”
The second report covered group-based child abuse, including grooming gangs. The report showed that in 2024, group-based crimes accounted for 3.6% of all child sexual abuse and exploitation crimes (4,450 out of 122,768 crimes). Approximately 17% were committed by grooming gangs, 32% within families, and 24% by child-child.
White British offenders made up 78.03% of offenders compared to 74.4% of the UK population, and Pakistani offenders made up 3.94% of offenders compared to 2.7% of the UK population.
