Social media sites failing to protect girls from harm at every stage

Our new research shows that the most popular social media sites are failing girls, making them vulnerable to grooming, abuse and harassment.

Our polling also shows that most British adults (86%) believe tech companies aren’t doing enough to protect girls from harm on social media.
Parents of girls aged 4-17 highlighted contact from strangers (41%), online grooming (40%), bullying from other children (37%) and sexual abuse or harassment (36%) as their top four concerns when it came to their daughter’s experiences online.
We’re calling on tech companies to rethink how social media platforms are designed and prioritise creating age-appropriate experiences for young girls online.

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The Targeting of Girls Online report

Social media platforms, messaging apps and gaming platforms are failing to protect girls at every stage, according to our new research.

We've worked with PA Consulting to conduct a new report, Targeting of Girls Online, which identified a wide range of risks girls face across ten popular online platforms including grooming, harassment and abuse.

As part of the research, fake profiles of a teenage girl were created on these sites.

The report found that the detailed nature of the profiles made it too easy for adult strangers to pick out girls and send uninvited messages to their accounts.

Findings also showed how many of the features and functionalities used by tech companies encourage young girls to increase their online networks and online activity – often reducing their own safety.

We’re urging Ofcom to address the significant gaps in its Illegal Harms Codes which fail to take into account specific risks which would be reduced by solutions found in the report.

Parents have expressed concern over their daughter's online safety

Our YouGov polling¹ of 3,593 adults from across Great Britain found that most respondents (86%) believe tech companies are doing too little to protect girls under the age of 18 on their platforms.

The survey also polled parents with daughters who listed contact from strangers (41%), online grooming (40%), bullying from other children (37%) and sexual abuse or harassment (36%) as their top four concerns related to their child’s experience online.

Around half of the parents surveyed (52%) expressed concern over their daughter’s online experiences.

The Targeting of Girls Online report looked at features and design choices of these platforms which expose girls to harm online – including abuse, harassment and exploitation from strangers.

We're proposing the following solutions

All services doing their own ‘abusability studies’ to find risky features and functionalities, as well as testing any new feature before rolling it out. These tests must include a gendered analysis of likely risk.
Social media apps should use screenshot capabilities as a reporting function, along with automatically detecting identifiable information in profiles.
Social media apps should use a 'cooling off' period once a connection is made between users, resulting in increased restrictions on interactions.
Increased measures to prevent non trusted adults from being able to video call young users.

In particular, Ofcom should develop best practice guidance for regulated services, which outlines how safety settings and other protections can be adapted based on children’s age.

The regulator should then work with service providers, especially those most popular with children, to implement this guidance.

Without these necessary protections, young users – in particular girls – remain highly vulnerable to unsafe online interactions.

We’ve heard from young girls for a long time about their negative experiences online through Childline which has encouraged us to undertake this research.

One 15-year-old* who contacted Childline said:

"I’ve been sent lots of inappropriate images online recently, like pictures of naked people that I don’t want to see. At first I thought they were coming from just one person, so I blocked them. But then I realised the stuff was coming from loads of random people I don’t know. I’m going to try and disable ways people can add me, so hopefully I’ll stop getting this stuff."

Rani Govender, policy manager for child safety online, said:

"Parents are absolutely right to be concerned about the risks their daughters' are being exposed to online, with this research making it crystal clear that tech companies are not doing nearly enough to create age-appropriate experiences for girls.

"We know both on and offline girls face disproportionate risks of harassment, sexual abuse, and exploitation. That’s why it’s so worrying that these platforms are fundamentally unsafe by design – employing features and dark patterns that are putting girls in potentially dangerous situations.

"There needs to be a complete overhaul of how these platforms are built. This requires tech companies and Ofcom to step up and address how poor design can lead to unsafe spaces for girls.

"At the same time Government must lay out in their upcoming Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG) Strategy steps to help prevent child sexual offences and tackle the design failures of social media companies that put girls in harm’s way."

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*Snapshots are based on real Childline service users but are not direct quotes. All names and potentially identifying details have been changed to protect the identity of the child or young person involved.

References

1. All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size is 3,593 adults who agreed to answer questions about children’s online safety. The sample of parents of daughters aged 4-17 years is 431 adults. Fieldwork was undertaken between 29 April and 1 May 2025. The survey was carried out online.