Social Media Firms Must Do More To Stop Underage Image Sharing
Social media platforms must do more to stop explicit images of children being shared online, a police chief has said.
Acting Chief Constable Becky Riggs called for tech giants to make greater use of AI to prevent obscene pictures being shared, but stopped short of backing a complete ban on social media for under 16s as in Australia.
The senior officer, who is national lead for child protection and abuse investigation, said platforms including TikTok were not doing enough in reporting crime.
New police figures for 2024 released on Thursday showed the most commonly-used platforms in reported child exploitation and abuse offences were Snapchat (54% 11,912); WhatsApp (8% 1,870) and Instagram (8% 1,705).
Ms Riggs said: “We experiment with some of these tech giants ourselves now to say, can we stop this crime from happening in the first place?
“Because that’s the utopia. Let’s put a hard stop in that prevents it from occurring.
“From ever occurring. Prevention is far better than the cure element of it.
“I know that these platforms, with the technology that’s out there, could prevent these harms from occurring in the first instance.”
The officer also called for parents to be able to buy a mobile phone for their child that they know will be safe to use.
She called for a situation where “a parent can know through a purchase that they’ve got a particular device that’s going to be safe for their child to use and, also, some of those social platforms are safe for their child to use”.
Ms Riggs spoke as new police statistics were released for child sexual exploitation and abuse offences in 2024.
The data showed that 122,768 child sexual exploitation offences were recorded in 2024, an increase of 7,279, or 6%, on the previous year.
Child sexual exploitation and abuse online increased by 26% in 2024 compared to the previous year, with 51,672 crimes recorded, 42% of the total.
WhatsApp overtook Facebook and Instagram compared to the previous year, with police believing it is because it is used to directly contact victims due to messages being encrypted, and an older demographic using Facebook.
Ms Riggs highlighted “disparities” with the way TikTok reports child sexual exploitation.
“There are some disparities in particular around Tiktok and there’s probably other platforms that we can name that there would be disparities for, around how bold and ambitious they are in terms of safeguarding, protecting members of society, particularly children.”
Police forces had recorded the age of perpetrators in 63% of cases, and, where recorded, 50% were aged 10 to 17 (40,824 of 81,659), a similar proportion to 2023.
The data published on Thursday showed the majority of both victims and perpetrators are aged 14 to 15.
Forces have highlighted public spaces including vape shops and takeaways being a risk for teenagers.
Another emerging threat is teenagers being blackmailed via so-called sextortion, where predators threaten to release explicit pictures of their victim.
The number of cases of sextortion recorded by the Internet Watch Foundation rose by 72% in the first half of 2025 from 89 to 153.
Self-defined ethnicity was recorded for 34%, or 38,015, of victims and 34%, or 44,396, of perpetrators.
The majority of perpetrators were white British, making up 86.9% of offenders, with the percentage of the UK population at 74.4% in the 2021 census.
Police believe most child sexual abuse goes unreported, with only one in 10 crimes reported to forces.
A separate report was released on group-based child abuse, including grooming gangs.
Data showed that in 2024 group-based offending accounted for 3.6% of all child sexual exploitation and abuse crimes (4,450 out of 122,768).
Within group-based abuse, around 17% is committed by grooming gangs, with the largest proportion carried out within families, 32%, followed by child on child crimes, 24%.
Pakistani perpetrators made up 3.94% of offenders when 2.7% of the UK population is this ethnicity, and white British 78.03% of offenders compared to 74.4% of the population.
Published: by Radio NewsHub