Thousands of young users in the UK and other western countries have joined twisted chat networks about abusing other children, the UK’s top crime agency warned.
In a report publised today, parents were warned that their teens could be part of ‘sadistic and violent’ groups where teens are encouraged to harm themselves or others of the same age or younger.
Operating on standard social media or instant messaging apps rather anything harder to access, the groups ‘routinely share harmful content and extremist or misogynistic rhetoric’.
The National Crime Agency report warns: ‘Extreme and illicit imagery depicting violence, gore, and child sexual abuse material is frequently shared amongst users, normalising and desensitising participants to increasingly extreme content and behaviours.’
They referred to the gangs as so-called ‘com’ networks, which use ‘extreme coercion’ to manipulate young victims into harming or abusing themselves, their siblings, or pets.
The warning comes as the UK has been gripped by Netflix drama Adolescence, which depicts a 13-year-old boy arrested for the murder of a classmate, having been radicalised online.
With over 24 million views, the series has broken British records, suggesting a wide concern about the issues raised.
Today’s report shows how easy it is to find violent and abusive content online, with the problem getting much worse in recent years.
Described as an ’emerging threat’, reports increased six-fold in the UK from 2022 to 2024.
Analysts estimate that thousands of users – offenders and victims – based in the UK and other western countries have exchanged millions of messages online relating to sexual and physical abuse.
This Is Not Right
On November 25, 2024 Metro launched This Is Not Right, a year-long campaign to address the relentless epidemic of violence against women.
With the help of our partners at Women’s Aid, This Is Not Right aims to shine a light on the sheer scale of this national emergency.
You can find more articles here, and if you want to share your story with us, you can send us an email at [email protected].
Read more:
Members are usually young men motivated by status, power, control,
hatred of women, sexual gratification, or an obsession with extreme material.
They often want to gain notoriety by inflicting the most harm on their victims or sharing the most disturbing content, while others are paedophiles who sell material to other sex offenders.
The gangs are ‘causing some individuals, especially younger people, to develop a dangerous propensity for extreme violence,’ the report warns.
Scale of child sexual abuse ‘increasing’
The report warned that ‘the scale, severity, and complexity of child sexual abuse is increasing and continues to cause substantial long-lasting harm to victims’.
Criminals are turning to AI to create ‘large volumes’ of child sexual abuse material, including ‘sadistic or extreme’ images.
Online, abuse is ‘almost certainly becoming more monetised’ with sexual extortion of children, particularly affecting boys.
Attackers indiscriminately target large numbers of victims, including children, with online ‘how to’ guides to sextortion available on the internet.
Child abuse in the UK
- The report says that 4 in 5 child sexual crimes are against girls, where gender is recorded
- In 2024, half of offenders reported to police for child sex abuse were young themselves, aged between 10 and 17
- Three quarters of offences occurred outside the family environment
- 710,000 to 840,000 adults in the UK are estimated to pose varying degrees of sexual risks to children
- The Internet Watch Foundation identifed 291,273 webpages with indecent images of children in 2024, a 6% increase since 2023
- Of these, 91% were ‘self-generated’ indecent imagery, either shared consensually, or elicited through manipulation
- The most common age of indecent image victims is 13 to 14 but there is a ‘continued upward trend’ in those aged under 10, particularly aged 7 to 10, with ‘peer norms creating pressure on young people’
With chatbots becoming better known and more widespread, AI is set to have a bigger impact on abuse in the UK.
The report warned that convincing child personas can be created using generative AI, using software to make their voices sound like a child’s voice to disguise the true person behind it.
Editing software can also be used to create fake nude images of children, used to threaten them for financial extortion.
Last month, Richard Ehiemere was convicted of fraud and indecent images of children offences, committed when he was just 17 and linked to a prolific online harms group.
In January, 19-year-old Cameron Finnegan was jailed for assisting suicide, possession of indecent images of children, a terror offence, and criminal damage.
Director general of the NCA Graeme Biggar said: ‘Young people are being drawn into these sadistic and violent online gangs where they are collaborating at scale to inflict, or incite others to commit, serious harm.
‘It is especially concerning to see the impact this is having on young girls who are often groomed into hurting themselves and in some cases, even encouraged to attempt suicide.’
Jess Phillips, minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, said the scale of child sexual abuse in the report is ‘absolutely horrific’, urging parents to have open conversations with their children and tech companies to ensure platforms are safe.
Alastair Simpson, national policing lead for Child Sexual Exploitation, said: ‘The growth of Com networks that incite and encourage children and vulnerable adults towards acts of self-harm, suicide and violence are hugely concerning.
‘The role of undercover online officers is vital in this space, and my message to anyone who is exploiting children online: remember that there is no space where criminals operate that we cannot go, and investigations into these networks have already begun.’
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected].
For more stories like this, check our news page.
MORE: Pensioners turned the heating up so much police thought it was a cannabis farm
MORE: RAF engineers ‘went against everything Paddington stands for’ breaking statue in half
MORE: Major twist in case of Emile Soleil, 2, who was found dead in the French Alps
