Four-year-old boy youngest victim of online grooming, data shows

A four-year-old boy was among the victims of online grooming, according to data which showed such offences have reached a record high.

The NSPCC said the data it had obtained from police forces showing an almost doubling of online grooming crimes in the past eight years was “deeply alarming”.

A new offence of sexual communication with a child was introduced in England and Wales in April 2017, to tackle groomers who target under-16s through mobile phones and social media.

The offence has been recorded in Northern Ireland since 2015 while a similar offence was introduced in Scotland in 2010.

Data obtained by the NSPCC from police forces across the UK showed 7,263 online grooming offences were recorded in the year to March – almost double the 3,728 recorded in the year to March 2018.

The NSPCC, which sent freedom of information requests, said it received data from all forces except Lincolnshire.

In 2,111 of the recorded offences in the past year a tech platform was identified.

Around 40% of those offences took place on messaging app Snapchat while 9% happened on WhatsApp and 9% on Facebook and Instagram, the NSPCC said.

While girls made up 80% of victims in cases where the gender was known in the past year, the youngest victim in that period was a four-year-old boy, the charity said.

The NSPCC said it was not informed of the means of communication which had been used to groom the boy, and declined to say which police force recorded this crime amid concerns the child might be identified.

The charity noted that each offence recorded by police could involve more than one victim and multiple methods of communication.

It also cautioned that the true number of grooming offences being committed is likely to be “much higher, due to abuse happening in private spaces where harms can be harder to detect”.

Asked about the possible reason for the high proportion of offences happening on Snapchat, the charity’s associate head of child safety online said almost three-quarters of British children use the platform and pointed out the ease with which users can add each other.

Raising the issue of being able easily to send direct messages, Matthew Sowemimo said: “There’s a ‘quick add’ that allows adults to really reach out to a very large number of child users.”

The NSPCC said it had done new research which identifies cycles of behaviours among perpetrators, including creating multiple different profiles and manipulating young users to engage with them across different platforms.

They called on tech firms to analyse the metadata they have access to, to spot suspicious patterns of behaviour.

The charity said this would not involve reading private messages, but could flag where adults repeatedly contact large numbers of children or create fake profiles – strong indicators of grooming.

They also suggested restrictions should be brought in on adult profiles, limiting who they can search and how many people they can contact.

The charity has also recommended implementing tools on a child’s phone to scan for nude images and identify child sexual abuse material before it is shared.

NSPCC chief executive Chris Sherwood said: “It’s deeply alarming that online grooming crimes have reached a record high across the UK, taking place on the very platforms children use every day.

“At Childline, we hear first-hand how grooming can devastate young lives. The trauma doesn’t end when the messages stop, it can leave children battling anxiety, depression and shame for years.”

The internet has “opened a door into millions of homes, giving predators access to children” with “very real” consequences, chief executive of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) Kerry Smith said.

She added: “Tech companies must do everything they can, including in end-to-end encrypted spaces, to keep children safe. It is clear now that this can be done effectively without compromising users’ privacy.

“There really is no excuse – and the alternative is allowing children to continue to suffer.”

Assistant Chief Constable Becky Riggs, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for child protection and abuse investigations, said while police forces are “working tirelessly to investigate these crimes, safeguard victims and bring offenders to justice”, policing alone “cannot stem the tide of online abuse”.

She added: “We need technology companies to take responsibility for the safety of children on their platforms.

“Children’s safety must be embedded into platform design – not treated as an afterthought. We urge tech companies to act swiftly and decisively, working in partnership with policing and child protection experts to ensure online spaces are safe for all users.”

A spokesperson for Snapchat said: “We work closely with the police, safety experts, and NGOs in an effort to prevent, identify, and remove this activity from our platform and, where appropriate, we report offenders to help secure justice for victims.

“We block teens from showing up in search results unless they have multiple mutual connections and they have to be mutual friends or existing phone contacts before they can communicate directly.

“We also deploy in-app warnings for teens to help prevent unwanted contact from people they may not know. We will keep strengthening our safety tools with the goal of making Snapchat an inhospitable place for people intent on doing harm.”