Officers in Scotland record over 3000 child sexual image abuse crimes since 2019
Over half of these crimes took place on Snapchat.
Police across Scotland have recorded 3,419 child sexual image abuse crimes over the last 5 years.
The figures from a Freedom of Information Request by the NSPCC also show half of these crimes took place on Snapchat and a quarter on Meta products (Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp).
Twenty-one year-old Aoife was targeted by a man when she was just 15 on an app called Yubo.
He pretended to be a teenager around her age and convinced her to download another app, Telegram, and then asked her to send him images of herself.
Then he blackmailed her with these, threatening to share them with all her friends and family on Facebook, to control her behaviour.
She told Northsound 1: "Everything just went black, it was like I was the only person in the world at that moment.
"It felt like I had made a massive mistake."
The NSPCC wants the UK Government to push Ofcom to review and strengthen their most recent codes of practice on tackling this threat to children's safety online.
The charity is also calling for private messaging services, including those using end-to-end encryption, to make sure there are robust safeguards in place to ensure their platforms do not act as a ‘safe haven’ for perpetrators of child sexual abuse.
Chris Sherwood, NSPCC Chief Executive, said: "It is deeply alarming to see thousands of child sexual abuse image crimes recorded by Police Scotland in the past five years.
These offences cause tremendous harm and distress to children, with much of this illegal material being repeatedly shared and viewed online.
"It is an outrage that in 2025 we are still seeing a blatant disregard from tech companies to prevent this illegal content from proliferating on their sites."
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