4-year-olds to be taught about online predators

PRIMARY school children are to be taught how to escape grooming by online sexual predators.

It comes amid warnings of an explosion in child sex crimes on the internet, with web paedophiles encouraging the abuse of ‘very, very young’ children.

Now pupils between the ages of four and seven will be taught how to recognise the signs of online abuse, blackmail and manipulation.

The National Crime Agency campaign – which takes the form of an animated cartoon series – marks the first time it has specifically targeted four-year-olds.

Rob Jones, of the NCA, said it was still ‘easy’ for paedophiles to access indecent images of children on the open web.

He said: ‘The technology exists to detect known child abuse images. It is a constant battle but the scale of that battle and the scale of the response really needs to go up to meet the trajectory of the threat.’

In 2017, there were about 10 million reports of child abuse images being viewed online globally. Last year, that rose to a staggering 18 million. It is believed about 110,000 reports relate to paedophiles in Britain.

An increasing number of child abuse images are generated by the victims themselves, either by children who don’t know they will end up in the hands of paedophiles, or those who have been manipulated into taking them.

The NCA cartoon shows a fouryear-old girl called Jessie watching a video on an iPad alone after her dad is distracted by a phone call. While she enjoys the first video – a song about internet safety – she is soon faced with a scary second video. Her pet dog convinces her to tell an adult she trusts that she had seen something online that had made her feel ‘worried, scared or sad’.