More than 100 child sex abuse image crimes logged a day

Telegraph

18-02-2025

More than 100 child sex abuse image crimes are being recorded every day by police, official figures show.
Home Office data show that 38,685 child sex abuse image offences were logged in 2023-24, the first time the reported scale of the crime has been revealed in England and Wales.
Snapchat was shown to be the biggest culprit, according to separate data, based on freedom of information requests to police forces by the children's charity NSPCC.
The analysis, based on 7,338 offences in 20 forces where police recorded the platform involved, showed Snapchat accounted for 3,648 cases, or 50 per cent, followed by Instagram with 840 (11 per cent), Facebook 537 (7 per cent) and WhatsApp 457 (6 per cent).
The problem was highlighted by Alexander McCartney, the UK's most prolific 'catfish', who ran a 'paedophile enterprise' targeting 3,500 children in 30 countries.
He was jailed for life last year and ordered to serve a minimum of 20 years after posing as a teenage girl to befriend young girls on Snapchat before blackmailing them.
'Unacceptable loophole'
It comes as leading charities including the NSPCC, Lucy Faithfull Foundation and Barnardo's are warning that children will not be protected from child sexual abuse on private messaging platforms under current plans for the Online Safety Act.
In a joint letter to Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, and Peter Kyle, the Technology Secretary, the charities argued that the current wording of the rules created an 'unacceptable loophole' for encrypted messaging services to avoid taking down illegal content.
The letter cited wording in online regulator Ofcom's codes of practice, which says that platforms must remove illegal content where it is 'technically feasible' – a phrase the charities claim will be used by encrypted messaging services to argue that they 'cannot be held accountable for the take down of illegal content'.
End-to-end encryption, offered by a number of messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, and by other services, means that no one other than those in a conversation can access its content, including the companies hosting the messages.
The debate over encrypted services and potential access to them has reignited after it emerged that the UK Government has ordered Apple to allow it to access encrypted files uploaded to the cloud.
In its letter, the charities said they were 'deeply concerned' about the Ofcom codes of practice as they stand, and that it would enable 'some services to evade delivering the most basic protections for children'.
They said: 'It is important to be clear about the implications of this decision. Whether it is a child being sent a nude image of themselves as a form of sexual extortion, or an adult being exposed to child sexual abuse material in a group chat, on some sites users will not be able to confidently report and have this content removed.
'Child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) material will stay in circulation, continuing to put children at extreme risk and resulting in great harm for victims, in direct contradiction of the Act.'
Police and security services around the world have pushed for more access to encrypted communications in recent years, warning that it allows criminals such as terrorists and child abusers to more easily hide and hampers their efforts to catch them – an issue also raised by online safety campaigners.
'Must be technically feasible'
In response, tech companies have argued that users have a right to privacy and that any backdoors into software created for intelligence and security services could also be exploited by criminals or authoritarian regimes.
An Ofcom spokesman said: 'The law says that measures in our codes of practice must be technically feasible. However, we expect the vast majority of platforms will be able to take content down and we will hold them to account if they don't.
'There'll be measures all platforms will need to take to protect children, such as reviewing child sexual abuse material when they become aware of it and reporting it to law enforcement.'