Net giant shame as 15 child sex crimes committed a day
The rise of almost a half in such crimes over just one year highlights how paedophiles are exploiting the web to target vulnerable youngsters, with some victims as young as three.
In the last year, 5,653 child sex crimes had an online element – a rise of 44 per cent on the 3,903 offences recorded in the previous year – according to the NSPCC. The offences included grooming children online for rape and sexual assault as well as making indecent films of victims using webcams.
And many youngsters have been persuaded to share naked photos and videos of themselves – only for the paedophile to use them for blackmail.
Yesterday, the NSPCC accused internet companies of failing youngsters and demanded the next government bring in an independent regulator to impose fines on those failing to protect children.
They want a range of measures, includ- ing forcing companies to create special children’s accounts which would have enhanced privacy settings and filters which block inappropriate content.
Children who spoke to the charity said that often the paedophiles pretended to be their own age to get them to meet up and then forced them to carry out sex acts.
However, many said they were too scared to tell their parents in case they ‘overreacted’ and forced them to stop using social media. One ten-yearold girl told Childline, run by the NSPCC, how she was targeted by a man who pretended to be a friend of her classmate.
She said: ‘ He said he was 11. I told him where I lived because I thought he knew my friend.
‘He’s asked me to send naked pictures to him and I said no, but now I’m scared he’s going to come to where I live.’ In another case, a boy, 14, sent naked pictures to a paedophile he thought was a boy his own age after starting an online relationship.
He added: ‘He’s now threatening to tell everyone that I’m gay and show them the pictures that I sent unless I keep talking to him and doing what he says.’
And a 15-year- old girl said she was raped after meeting up with a paedophile she met online. She said: ‘ He turned out to be twice my age. He forced me to have sex with him. I feel so ashamed.’
The rising figures of online offences were collected from 39 police forces across England and Wales in the years 2015-16 and 2016-17.
Over these two years, for the first time police have been required to record – or ‘cyber flag’ – any crime that involved the internet. They included almost 100 offences committed against children aged ten and under, with the youngest victim being three.
Peter Wanless, chief executive of the NSPCC, said: ‘These figures confirm our fears that offenders are exploiting the internet to target children for their own dark deeds.
‘Children also tell our Childline service that they are being targeted online by some adults who
‘Threatening to tell everyone’
pose as children and try to meet them, or persuade them to perform sexual acts on webcams, then blackmailing them.
‘This terrifies them and can leave some feeling worthless, depressed, and suicidal.’
The charity is campaigning for a law to force social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to display clear age ratings to reflect the kind of content displayed on their sites, in the same way that films are categorised.
Under its proposals, social networks would also have to use software that can pick up suspected grooming behaviour and filter harmful content. And the use of trained human moderators on social networking sites should also be increased so that they can pick up and respond to grooming behaviour, the NSPCC say. Con- servative candidate for Stroud, Neil Carmichael, who was chairman of the commons education select committee before the general election was called, said of the NSPCC figures: ‘The scale of the activity shocks me, although I’m not surprised that through the internet this has got such a foothold. I’m very concerned about children and the access they have to the internet.
‘We have got to tighten up on the organisations that allow inappropriate access. We need to legislate on this in some way. We have to demonstrate that we are not going to tolerate this.’
It comes after government ministers criticised Facebook and other social networking sites for failing to intercept paedophiles online. An investigation last month found paedophiles were freely sharing child abuse images via closed groups on Facebook – prompting criticism from Home Secretary Amber Rudd.
Responding to the NSPCC figures, a spokesman for Twitter said: ‘When we are made aware of links to images of or content promoting child sexual exploitation they will be removed from the site without further notice and reported to The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.’ Social networks also came in for criticism after the Manchester bombing last week.
A Daily Mail investigation found Google, Twitter and Facebook were still circulating terror manuals despite being warned about them 24 hours earlier. The handbooks instructed extremists to murder children, target concerts and make home-made bombs.