More than 200,000 secondary school children may have been groomed online, research suggests.
A survey carried out on behalf of children’s charity the NSPCC found that around 4% of young people aged 11 to 17 questioned had sent, received or been asked to send sexual content to an adult when using various sites and apps.
Read more: Glasgow cancer doctor caught grooming '14-year-old' for sex after police sting
The charity said that one in 25 children had done so using Snapchat, Facebook or Facebook Messenger; one in 33 using Twitch and Twitter and one in 50 using Instagram and WhatsApp.
![Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp icons on a smartphone](http://image.assets.pressassociation.io/v2/image/production/290c61c4d4896638b2b5cba5d58ad088Y29udGVudHNlYXJjaCwxNTY0NDk3Mzcw/2.41898804.jpg?w=640)
A total of 2,004 young people aged 11 to 17 were asked if they had ever sent messages with sexual content, been sent a naked picture or video or been asked to send these images, and the age of the person with whom they were interacting.
NSPCC chief executive Peter Wanless said: “The scale of risk that children face on social networks revealed in this research cannot be ignored and tackling it with robust and comprehensive legislation needs to be a priority for this Government.
Read more: Calls for child abuse inquiry to open up phase on Scottish travellers
“Tech firms need to be forced to get a grip of the abuse taking place on their sites by using technology to identify suspicious behaviour and designing young people’s accounts with built-in protections.”
The NSPCC said that there are around 5,182,045 young people aged 11 to 17 in the UK, and estimated that therefore around 201,696 had sent, received or been asked to send explicit messages or images.
The charity has warned that paedophiles contact large numbers of children on social media and then encourage the ones who respond to move over to encrypted messaging or live streaming.
Those who are tricked into sending images, often after being threatened, can then be blackmailed into sending more.
Facebook’s head of global safety, Antigone Davis, said: “Keeping young people safe on our platforms is a top priority for us.
“In addition to using technology to proactively detect grooming and prevent child sexual exploitation on our platform, we work with child protection experts, including specialist law enforcement teams like CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Command) in the UK, to keep young people safe.
“Ninety-nine percent of child nudity content is removed from our platform automatically.”
Read more: Action call over record haul of child sexual abuse pictures online
In April, the Government launched an online harms white paper that includes a statutory duty of care on technology companies, enforced by an independent regulator.
A Home Office spokesman said: “Online child sexual exploitation is an abhorrent crime and one which the Government is committed to stamping out.
“That is why the Home Secretary is this week hosting technology firms and our international security allies to work on how we can make online platforms safer.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here