Online child sexual abuse in England and Wales has climbed sharply over the past year, with newly released figures showing a 26 per cent rise in digitally facilitated offences.
The increase has intensified pressure on social media companies to strengthen safety measures and prevent harmful content from spreading on their platforms, reports Guardian.
Acting Staffordshire Police Chief Constable Becky Riggs, who leads child protection efforts for the National Police Chiefs’ Council, called on the technology companies to use advanced AI tools that can automatically block the upload and circulation of indecent material.
Riggs said platforms already have the technological capability to stop much of the harm before it reaches young users. She also argued that devices commonly used by children should come with built-in restrictions that limit access to unsafe apps and websites.
Police records show that 122,768 child sexual exploitation offences were registered in 2024, marking a six per cent rise from the previous year. Among these, online exploitation accounted for 51,672 offences, or 42 per cent of the total. Half of all recorded incidents involved children aged between 10 and 17, with the sharing of indecent images identified as the most frequent offence within this group.
Gareth Edwards, head of the vulnerability knowledge and practice programme at the National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and Public Protection, said online exploitation remained the fastest-growing threat. He noted that it is very difficult to determine whether the rise of abuse reflects a genuine increase in offending or if improved reporting by platforms ahead of the Online Safety Act has contributed to the higher numbers.
Other studies, including research funded by the Youth Endowment Fund, have also indicated that the problem is worsening.
Edwards added that an emerging concern is the rise in sextortion, in which young people are blackmailed with threats to release sensitive images. However, the scale of this online threat is still challenging to measure due to limited reporting.
Anna Edmundson, head of policy at the NSPCC, urged the government to commission a national prevalence study to better understand the experiences of children and young people, noting that police data alone does not reflect the true extent of the issue.
Police figures also show that most child exploitation reports involve a small number of widely used platforms. Snapchat accounted for more than half of all recorded incidents, followed by WhatsApp and Instagram. Facebook saw fewer reports as its user base ages.
Riggs said Snapchat had the highest level of reporting to law enforcement, while platforms such as TikTok and X generated comparatively fewer alerts. She noted that companies vary significantly in how actively they search for harmful content and work with police.
The NSPCC said the publication of two major reports provides the most detailed picture so far of child sexual abuse and exploitation trends in the UK, though the organisation believes only one in ten offences is ever reported to the authorities.
A second report focusing on group-based exploitation found that such cases accounted for 3.6 per cent of all child sexual exploitation offences in 2024, totalling 4,450 incidents. Of these, around 17 per cent involved in grooming gangs, 32 per cent occurred within families, and 24 per cent involved child-on-child incidents. Data also showed that White British perpetrators made up 78.03 per cent of offenders compared to 74.4 per cent of the population, while Pakistani perpetrators represented 3.94 per cent compared with 2.7 per cent of the entire population.
Riggs said the rapid shift of abuse into online spaces demands a stronger, coordinated response from policing, government, industry and civil society. She said preventing harm before it reaches a child must remain the central priority as more offending moves into digital environments.
