Online child grooming crimes in Northern Ireland at record high
The NSPCC have revealed police figures
Online grooming crimes recorded by the Police Service of Northern Ireland jumped by 139% in the last three years to an all-time high.
Last year alone (2020/2021) there were 196 recorded offences according to figures found by the NSPCC.
Of the 196 offences in 2020/21, 78% were known to be female with the youngest victim only five years old.
The child protection charity has warned that offenders are exploiting “risky design features” on popular apps for children, with Instagram being the most common platform used by groomers in the past year.
A 15-year-old girl told one of our Childline counsellors: “I’ve been chatting with this guy who’s like twice my age. This all started on Instagram but lately our chats have been on WhatsApp. He seemed really nice to begin with, but then he started making me do these things to ‘prove my trust to him’, like doing video chats with my chest exposed.”*
NSPCC Northern Ireland is calling on the Executive to prioritise child online safety by funding and fully implementing the Online Safety Strategy and Action Plan without delay, taking timely and meaningful action to fully protect children from the biggest ever online child abuse threat.
The charity is also calling on the Northern Ireland Executive to work closely with the UK Government to step up the ambition of the Online Harms Bill to ensure that its proposals comprehensively tackle an online abuse threat that is greater than ever before. It says the Draft Online Safety Bill published in May needs to go much further to keep children safe and ensure it creates a practical response that corresponds to the scale and nature of the child abuse problem.
A spokesperson for the Executive said: "The Online Safety Strategy and Action Plan for Northern Ireland was published on 9 February 2021.
"The Action Plan covers the first three years of the five year strategy. The overall cost of implementation for the first 3 years is an estimated £7.5m.
"Funding of circa £.5m to cover year 1 actions has been secured by the Department of Health. Actions in year 1 will fall to the Safeguarding Board for Northern Ireland. SBNI is making arrangements to recruit a regional co-ordinator, who will be responsible for the co-ordination of activity under the strategy."