Children
are increasingly being groomed over the internet for the sole purpose
of online sexual abuse, research by a child protection watchdog
suggests.
Only seven per cent of the 1,145 online
abuse cases reported to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection
Centre in 2012 involved people trying to meet a child.
Ceop said offenders may target hundreds of victims at a time, and described the abuse as an “alarming new trend”.
The organisation said parents needed to talk to their children about the issue.
Peter Davies, chief executive of Ceop –
which monitors child abuse online – said: “We’ve seen a drop in the
amount of grooming with a view to meeting offline. That’s still a risk
but it’s a diminishing risk. “The growth area seems to be grooming,
contact, and then sexual abuse purely online. We really need to make
sure that young people are target hardened [sic] against that.
“We can talk to young people and educate
them on staying safe online just as we do about stranger danger or
drugs,” Claire Lilly, says.
“It’s amazing, the number of parents I
meet who would not think twice about talking to their kids about just
about anything else that is risky – but have a blind spot about online.”
There were 1,145 reports to Ceop in 2012
relating to incidents of online grooming. However, only 7% of these
related to attempting to meet a child offline, a drop from 12% in 2011.
Online sexual abuse is commonly conducted via webcams, instant messenger applications and social networking sites.
The research by Ceop and the University of
Birmingham suggested physical contact did not appear to be a motivation
for offenders who sought to abuse children in this way.
Ceop said that once initial contact is made, it “often rapidly escalates into threats and intimidation”.
A Ceop spokeswoman said some offenders
hack into the accounts of victims and say they will only get their
account back if they do what the abuser tells them to do.
Thereafter the abuser makes more demands
“so the victim often feels like they haven’t got any control… and it
ends up in this spiral of continuous abuse”, she added.
Mr Davies said the “devastation” caused to young people’s lives through online grooming could be seen on a daily basis.
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