Nearly one in 10 UK parents say their child has been blackmailed online, with harms ranging from threatening to release intimate pictures to revealing details about someone’s personal life.
The NSPCC child protection charity also found that one in five parents know a child who has experienced online blackmail, while two in five said they rarely or never talked to their children about the subject.
The National Crime Agency has said that it is receiving more than 110 reports a month of child sextortion attempts, where criminal gangs trick teenagers into sending intimate pictures of themselves and then blackmail them.
Agencies across the UK, US and Australia have confirmed a rising number of sextortion cases involving teenage boys and young adult males being targeted by cyber-criminal gangs based in west Africa or south-east Asia, some of which have ended in tragedy. Murray Dowey, a 16-year-old from Dunblane, Scotland, killed himself in 2023 after becoming a victim of sextortion on Instagram and Dinal De Alwis, 16, killed himself in Sutton, south London, in October 2022 after being blackmailed over nude photographs.
The NSPCC based its findings on a survey of more than 2,500 parents and said that tech companies were continuing to “fall short in their duty to protect children”.
Rani Govender, a policy manager at NSPCC, said: “Children deserve to be safe online, and that must be built into the very fabric of these platforms, not bolted on after harm has already been done.”
The NSPCC’s definitions of blackmail included threatening to release an intimate image or video of the child, or something the victim wanted to keep private, such as their sexuality. The information could have been obtained consensually or it could have been obtained by coercion, manipulation or created using artificial intelligence.
Perpetrators can be strangers, such as sextortion gangs, or someone the child knows, such as a friend or schoolmate. The blackmailer can also demand a range of things in exchange for not sharing information, such as money, more images or staying in a relationship.
The NSPCC said its definition of blackmail overlapped with sextortion but included a wider range of scenarios. “We chose the term ‘blackmail’ in our research because it allowed us to include extortion using other types of information that a child might want to keep private (eg their sexuality, images showing them without a religious garment) as well as a range of both sexual and non-sexual demands and threats,” the charity said.
The report also advised against “sharenting”, which refers to parents sharing photos of and information about their children online.
Experts recommend telling children what a sextortion threat looks like and being aware of who they are talking to online. They also advise creating everyday opportunities for children to talk to adults, such as during meals together or regular car trips, so that teenagers feel they have a space where they can reveal they have been targeted by blackmail.
“Knowing how to talk about online blackmail in an age-appropriate way and creating an environment where children feel safe to come forward without fear of judgment can make all the difference,” said Govender.
The NSPCC also interviewed young people about why they might choose not to reveal a blackmail attempt to their parent or carer. The reasons for not disclosing the crime, according to the responses, include feeling embarrassed, preferring to talk to a friend first and feeling they “can handle it themselves”.
