Technology needs to do a better job to protect North East kids
New research from the NSPCC shows that child grooming offences desperately need to be tackled
Police forces and security experts in the North East say tackling child grooming through technology will only work if everyone comes together - that's government, law enforcement and the technology companies themselves.
The NSPCC is calling on the government to introduce grooming alerts for victims and moderators. The organisation believe that already existing technology must be developed in order to reduce the number of cases regarding child grooming offences.
Algorithms already automatically flag child abuse images, hate speech and extremist content to moderators for removal. The NSPCC want the Home Office to use existing technology to flag unusual account patterns associated with grooming behaviours.
These unusual account patterns include: friending and following many young people with no mutual friends or geographic links, receiving a large number of rejected friend requests from children, or spikes in views of posts made by under-18 accounts.
When children are speaking to adults online, it is already possible for grooming language to be picked up automatically and to then send an alert to that child. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport have the opportunity to make this happen, yet say their Internet Safety Strategy will produce a code for social networks that will only be voluntary – which the NSPCC argue doesn’t go far enough.
In the first six months of a new initiative allowing police to arrest child groomers before they meet their victims, over 1,300 cases of sexual communication with a child were reported. The most group most likely to be targeted were girls between the ages of 12 and 15 – with some victims as young as seven.
Tony Stower, NSPCC Head of Child Safety Online, said: “Despite the staggering number of grooming offences in just six months, Government and social networks are not properly working together and using all the tools available to stop this crime from happening.
“The Government’s Internet Safety Strategy must require social networks to build in technology to keep their young users safe, rather than relying on police to step in once harm has already been done.
“If the Government makes a code for social networks that is entirely optional and includes no requirement for platforms to tackle grooming, this is a massive missed opportunity and children will continue to be put at risk.”
In the same way that technology is being used to automatically detect illegal content, such as child abuse images or extremist material, the organisation want to flag up potential groomers to moderators based on grooming patterns of behaviour online.