Online child abuse surging as over 10,000 sex offences logged

MORE than 10,000 online child sex offences were logged by police in a year for the first time, as the NSPCC warned social media was allowing paedophiles to target multiple children.

Data obtained by the NSPCC revealed 10,391 crimes were recorded by all 46 forces across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands for 2019/20.

It represented a 16 per cent rise from the previous year and included cyberrelated crimes such as grooming, sexual assault and rape. It took the total number of recorded offences in the five years since it became mandatory to record whether a crime involved the internet to more than 37,000.

The NSPCC said the figures illustrated the way that paedophiles could blitz multiple social media accounts with similar messages targeted at children in the hope that they could latch on to a number of potential targets.

Andy Burrows, NSPCC head of child safety online policy, said: “These figures form part of an extremely concerning upward trend that imply the scale and complexity of online child abuse is surging.

“It is far too easy for offenders to target large numbers of young people on social media to groom and abuse them, which is why the Government must make progress on online harms legislation this autumn to urgently protect them.

“It is now almost 17 months since the government’s original proposals for social media regulation were published and children continue to face preventable harm online.”

The data do not include the lockdown period, but the charity said there was evidence from Childline counselling sessions that the grooming of children online increased when restrictions were enforced.