Our Wild West Web campaign calls for mandatory rules to ensure social media networks keep children safe.
In the first 9 months since it became a criminal offence to have sexual communication with a child there were 1,628 offences recorded by the police. For offences where the method of communication was known, apps owned by Facebook were used in over half of these cases as a way to contact and groom children.
Our new campaign, Wild West Web, calls on Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, to tackle this problem by bringing in mandatory safe guarding rules which protect children online.
Figures show that since April 2017:
- 32.6% of grooming cases involved the use of Facebook
- 18.8% of grooming cases used the Facebook owned apps Instagram and WhatsApp
- the second most-used app in grooming cases was Snapchat.1
Figures released by the Home Office on 26th April 2018 show that the total number of police-recorded grooming offences for the first 9 months of 2016/17, including both the offence of meeting a child following grooming and the new offence of sexual communication with a child, was 2,966.
