Call to prioritise children's online safety at election

Experts warning of a "hidden pandemic" of online sexual abuse have urged politicians to prioritise children's internet safety in their general election campaigns - and to treat the issue as a public health emergency comparable to Covid.

- ANDY GREGORY

A new report has this week uncovered grim insights into the prevalence of online sexual abuse both globally and in the UK. Around one in eight children around the world have been victims of non-consensual taking, sharing and exposure to sexual images and video in the past year – equating to more than 300 million children, new research by University of Edinburgh researchers suggests, in the first-ever global estimate of the scale of the crisis.

The same number of children are estimated to have been subjected to sexting and unwanted sexual act requests by adults or other youths, according to the study, which draws on data from some 36 million reports to five major watchdogs and policing organisations globally.

In Britain, the researchers carried out a first-of-its-kind survey of more than 1,500 men, suggesting that as many as 1.84 million males in the UK may have carried out a form of online sexual abuse against the underaged. In a further breakdown of the findings, shared exclusively with The Independent, the extrapolated results of the survey also suggests that:

• 3.7 per cent of men (976,800) in the UK may have flirted or had sexual conversations with children

• 2.9 per cent of men (765,600) in the UK may have deliberately viewed sexual images of children

• 2 per cent of men (528,000) may have paid for online sexual interactions, images or videos of under-18s

• 1.4 per cent of men (370,000) may have taken part in sexually explicit webcamming with children

Meanwhile, new statistics showed the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children watchdog was alerted to 178,648 cases of files containing sexual images of children being uploaded or hosted in the UK last year – equivalent to nearly 500 alerts every day.