Girls persuaded to film explicit videos
GIRLS as young as 11 are being persuaded to film and broadcast sexually explicit videos of themselves as part of a worrying new trend that is seeing over 100 cases a day, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose.
Monitors scouring the internet to remove videos are finding thousands of “self generated” material, warning they now account for a third of indecent pages being intercepted in the UK.
Some 22,000 separate videos have been removed already this year, the Internet Watch Foundation revealed, featuring girls between 11 and 13.
Many of the young people who film themselves do so in the belief that the video will only be viewed by someone they believe to be a boyfriend or close friends, and film themselves in their own bedrooms.
But in reality the person on the other end of the web-camera is often a predatory paedophile, who has manipulated the victim into believing they are in a relationship with someone their own age.
In other cases, material that was meant to be kept private can be posted on the internet and then tracked down by paedophiles. And experts have also found live streaming websites where youngsters film themselves performing explicit acts in order to win the approval of an online audience
Last year the IWF, which is funded by the tech industry and works to eliminate child sex abuse imagery from the internet, removed 105,000 web pages, the highest figure ever.
Susie Hargreaves, its chief executive, said there had been an explosion in the volume of self-generated videos featuring very young girls and they were now beginning to replace traditional paedophile material found online. She said: “Of the material we have seen this year, 96 per cent of videos feature girls and of those 85 per cent are aged between 11 and 13.
“In one video I have seen, a little girl is responding to a request, and she is actually actively engaged in what we call a Category A activity, which is the worst level of sexual abuse, and yet you can hear someone shouting ‘dinner is ready’.”
Ms Hargreaves said any child who has a web enabled device and access to high speed internet is vulnerable to exploitation and ought to have their online activity supervised. She said: “Children are in their homes, in their bedrooms on webcams and they are being coerced, tricked or encouraged into performing sexual acts, which are filmed by someone on the other side and then added child sexual abuse websites.
“Children are terribly unaware that these videos are being shared. In some cases they are clearly being groomed.”
Last week, the NSPCC published figures that revealed the number of grooming cases in which paedophiles had contacted children online had risen by a third in the past year.