Rise in online child sexual abuse in South Yorkshire

The number of South Yorkshire children being targeted online by sexual predators has shot up by over a third in the past year.

New figures show over 300 child sex offences involving the internet were reported here in the last 12 months - a rise of more than 35% from the year before.

The NSPCC are now calling for more regulation to hold social media companies to account for it.

They want whichever party wins the election to make safeguarding children a priority.

Darren Worth's from the charity here in Yorkshire - he says the figures are worrying:

"The figures clearly indicate that there's a need for us to protect children when they're using the internet and it's a good time for us to raise awareness. In the last ten years the internet has become the number one source of media for children and young people. We think it's really important we put some sort of regulation in place to keep young people safe."

"One of the problems is that the internet is kind of unregulated so it's very difficult for us to be able to keep our children and young people safe. We would like to call on whoever is in the government to take action to protect young people online."

In 2015/16, there were 229 child sex offences in South Yorkshire which involved the internet. That number's gone up to 311 in 2016/17.

That's a rise of 35.8%.

Darren says there are lots of things that can be done to help protect children online:

"It could be something like children automatically being offered safer accounts with default privacy settings, filtering of harmful content, we want social networks to be regulated just like the other media so they can be held to account when they fail to protect children and we would call on the government to draw up minimum standards internet companies must meet."