Children not safe online warns National Crime Agency

The head of the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) has warned that the environment online is not safe for children to use.

NCA head, Graham Biggar, told the Daily Mail: “We would prefer children to be able to participate online safely and reap the benefits it provides. At the moment, they cannot.” He continued: “The online environment in its current form is not safe for children. Enough is enough. We have already failed two generations of teenagers by abandoning them to the dangers of social media without any form of safety net. The longer we wait, the slower we go, the more children we fail.””

Investigators at the NCA have received 92,000 reports of child abuse activity online from tech companies in the last year, a figure which has quadrupled over the past seven years. The NCA receive around 25 reports of child abuse a day from the online gaming platform Roblox, and 50 reports a day from the gaming communication app Discord. Instagram accounts for about 75 reports a day, and Snapchat has generated around 100 reports each day to the NCA. Biggar believes that Facebook poses a particular risk after its decision to encrypt messages led to a 50% drop in reported child sex abuse.

Biggar said: “We assess there are between 710,000 and 840,000 adults in the UK who pose some degree of sexual risk to children. Last year we received 92,000 reports of potential child abuse activity online from tech companies – a fourfold increase in the last seven years. Last month we received over 12,000. That is over 400 a day. Every day. The referrals we are receiving are not only increasing in number but also in severity; they involve younger and younger children, and we are increasingly seeing children offending as well as being victims. These are big numbers, but behind each one is an individual child, for whom this abuse can be life changing.”

He added: “We need to call out the scale of the problem here. We need to be collectively horrified by it and we need as a society to address it. We will absolutely do our part in law enforcement, but we have to raise the alarm on the scale of this happening.”