New Delhi: Amid a rising trend of child sexual abuse in the UK, over 20,000 British men were found to be interested in sexually abusing minors.
According to a British police in-charge of child protection, investigators have stumbled upon an online chatroom being used by 4,000 men in UK itself. Simon Bailey, the head of National Police Chiefs’ Council, estimated that the figure could be anything around 20,000 such predators who use online platforms to put children at risk.
A report in Guardian quoted Bailey as saying that “limited resources meant not all perpetrators could be tackled, with police forced to focus on the most dangerous offenders”.
Bailey also warned that children were faced with a growing threat from live streaming. In order to check this threat, the police have approached tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter.
This comes amid a 31% rise in reported cases of sexual abuse against children in UK in the previous year.
According to the report, in the first 11 months of 2017, there were about 72,000 referrals received by the British National Crime Agency about online child sexual abuse imagery, up from 6,000 in 2010.
“I think there is more sexual abuse of children being perpetrated both physically and virtually,” he said. “There are more men than five to 10 years ago who are trying to abuse children.”
The senior police officer also believes that thousands of such predatory men are taking to these online platforms with an intention to groom unsuspecting children to their ways of abuse.
Bailey, in an attempt to ring an alarm, says that parents, no matter how caring and watchful they are towards their kids, need to warn their children and keep repeating it for the little ones to understand the risks of internet.
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