Sajid Javid calls on Google, Facebook and others to help curb spread of abuse images

A “call to action” for technology companies such as Facebook and Google to do more to help combat online child sexual abuse is to be sounded on Monday by the home secretary, Sajid Javid, as a part of a new government push.

Javid will make the announcement as figures from the National Crime Agency (NCA) reveal that up to 80,000 people in the UK present some kind of sexual threat to children online, although experts caution that this is a conservative estimate.

New funding support for law enforcement battling the problem is also expected to be unveiled as the home secretary outlines a “personal mission to tackle child abuse in all its forms” in what is being trailed as a flagship speech.

The NCA said on Sunday that more than 130 suspects – including a former police officer and five teachers – were arrested in a recent crackdown on online child sexual abuse offenders over the course of one week in July.



Of those arrested, 13 were registered sex offenders and 19 held positions of trust, with a children’s entertainer, an ex-police officer and two special constables also arrested.

The NCA said it had received 82,109 referrals for child sexual abuse images from social media companies in 2017 – a 700% increase since 2012. Violations are also becoming more serious, with the abuse of babies and children aged under 10 being more regularly documented, according to the Home Office.

Growing trends include the livestreaming of abuse, which comes against the backdrop of increasing internet speeds, smartphone technology and the growing ease of money transfers across borders.



Javid is expected to say: “It was when I visited the National Crime Agency’s child exploitation online protection command that the full horror of the scale and evolving nature of child sexual abuse was really brought home to me.

“One officer I met, who had previously worked in counterterrorism for over 20 years, told me how, in all his years of working, he’s never been so shocked by the scale of the threat, or the determination of the offenders, as he is in his current job.”

The NCA said it was seeing an increase in hidden or encrypted online opportunities for higher-risk offending, with end-to-end encryption and increased anonymity online progressively becoming standard.

The NCA’s lead for tackling child sexual abuse, Rob Jones, said the agency was seeing an increase in the number of sophisticated offenders using the dark web to groom and harm children on the mainstream internet.

While investigators still have to deal with significant numbers of offenders committing preventable crimes, such as viewing and sharing images of sexual abuse and videos known to law enforcement, he said that the technology exists for industry to design out these offences, to stop the images being shared.

“While some online platforms have taken important steps to improve safety, we are asking them to take it to the next step; to innovate, to use their brightest minds, and to invest in preventing these online offences from happening in the first place,” he added.

The National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for child protection, Chief Constable Simon Bailey, said there was an expectation that technology companies “acknowledge their social responsibility in preventing and designing out this type of offending from their platforms”.

Existing Home Office initiatives in the area include a £600,000 investment last year in Project Arachnid – a web-crawler fed by “hashes” or digital fingerprints of known sexual abuse imagery of children. It trawls the web to identify web pages with suspected abuse content and has led to the issuing of more than 800,000 takedown notices for online material.

