Our #WildWestWeb campaign calls for a new regulator to protect children and hold social media networks to account
The number of child abuse image offences recorded by police in the UK rose by almost a quarter last year, with an average of 1 offence every 23 minutes1.
New figures obtained by us from Freedom of Information requests to every police force in the country, found that 22,724 offences were recorded in 2017/18.
A single offence recorded by police can involve hundreds of indecent images of children.
Offenders use social networks to target children for abuse online, grooming and manipulating them into sending naked images.
- Last month, we revealed that an average of 1 in 50 schoolchildren had sent a nude or semi-nude image to an adult.
- Our #WildWestWeb campaign is calling on Government to prevent abuse from happening in the first place by introducing an independent regulator to hold social networks to account, tackle grooming and cut off the supply of these images at source.