Rise in child abuse online threatens to overwhelm UK police, officers warn

The vast, and growing, volume of child abuse material being created and shared online is threatening to overwhelm police efforts to tackle it, senior officers have told the Guardian.

And the situation is likely to worsen, National Crime Agency (NCA) child abuse lead Rob Jones warned, if social media sites such as Facebook press ahead with further encryption of messaging services.

Law enforcement against online child abuse in the UK was “the best in the world by some distance”, Jones said. “But we are arresting and dealing with more offenders than ever, the numbers are growing and growing, as are the number of children being safeguarded.”

The numbers involved are staggering. The UK’s child abuse image database has 17m unique images on it, and it is growing by 500,000 every two months.

Children were posting pictures of themselves online and predators were targeting them, Jones explained.

“Children sharing videos and photos online has exploded,” he said. “And once a child posts an image it can become a honey pot for offenders posing as children. They link and chat to the child and it is very, very quick that the child is compromised. Often they are too scared to reach out for help.”

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Simon Bailey, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for child protection, described the horror of this abuse, which mainly targets girls aged between 11 and 13.

“You see a young person who is being told to insert objects inside themselves, and in the background you hear mum calling them down for their dinner.”

Once images of the child have been sent to an abuser, “they are out in the wild, recirculating,” Jones warned.

‘They are told to abuse a child to gain entry’

One of the key messages Jones wants to get across is that when abusive images are shared it is not on the dark web, but on open, easy-to-access sites.

“Child abuse is three or four clicks away,” he said. “There is no block, no barrier to entry at all. Any search engine will allow people with a sexual interest in children to meet like-minded individuals who normalise it, rationalise it, encourage it. They will then move to closed chat forums where they will be told they need to abuse a child to gain entry to image-sharing sites.”

All of this, he said, was exacerbated by children’s increasing dependence on the online world.

“[The lockdown] has seen children completely relying on the internet to live their lives,” he pointed out. “And keeping pace with that dependence is difficult for parents.”

A key part of the work the NCA does is to stop children being “revictimised” as their images are shared again and again by paedophiles. One way this is done is using photo hashes, digital files that match known images of child abuse and are used to scan sites such as Facebook, Google or the game platform Roblox.

Facebook has said it plans to encrypt its Messenger service, bringing it in line with WhatsApp and Instagram, which it also owns.

“If encryption goes ahead we stand to lose it all,” Jones said. “As companies move to end-to-end encryption there is a real risk that all the leads we talk about, the monitoring of known images that often lead us directly to offenders, will be lost.

“More and more children are being groomed and abused and it’s not as if the industry doesn’t know this. They are fully informed and have chosen to ignore the horrors of what we find daily.”

Last month, Facebook told British MPs that encryption would mean scanning technologies would no longer pick up as much child abuse material.

Monika Bickert, the firm’s head of global policy management, told the home affairs select committee that the company would not be able to pass on as many reports of child abuse. “I would expect the numbers to go down. If content is being shared and … it’s content we cannot see then it’s content we cannot report,” she said.

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Responding to the criticism from the NCA, a spokesperson for Facebook insisted that they would still be tackling abuse on their platforms:

“Facebook has led the industry in developing new ways to prevent, detect, and respond to abuse. End-to-end encryption is already the leading technology used by many services to keep people safe online and, when we roll it out on our other messaging services, we will build on our strong anti-abuse capabilities at WhatsApp. For example, WhatsApp bans around 250,000 accounts each month suspected of sharing child exploitative imagery.”

Between April and September last year, 4,700 people, nearly all men, were arrested for online child abuse offences and more than 6,000 children were safeguarded.

Jones is particularly concerned over the growth of live streaming, where paedophiles pay to watch children abused in poorer countries.

“Live streaming is a marker for severe offending,” he said. “That is what is terrifying about this casework. Offenders have become so desensitised that to receive sexual gratification they will ask for very specific, bespoke abuse to be carried out.”

“My great fear,” Jones added, “is that with increasing access to technology around the world, more children and poor families who can’t afford to feed their children will be exposed to this risk.”

Because live streaming is difficult to track in real time it was vital, Bailey and Jones said, to protect access to messaging services where images will be shared.

“This is the low-hanging fruit,” Jones said. “The monitoring of known images can often lead us directly to offenders. The technology is there to prevent it, but the internet companies are not doing enough to tackle the threat.”