Facebook dominates recorded cases of social media grooming

“Social media grooming is one of the main issues that a lot of parents’ fear when allowing their children online.  In the last two and a half years alone, there have been over 10,000 online grooming offences recorded by police in England and Wales.  Dominating those recorded is Facebook-owned platforms with over half of the cases being attributed to the social media giant (where the method of communication was recorded).  This demonstrates a clear issue with the priorities for protecting minors from sexual communications through the messaging options offers on their applications and platforms.

This information has been curated through FOI’s (Freedom of Information) requests logged by the NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children), a large child protection charity who have repeatedly been behind the push for more transparent reporting of the risks, dangers and cases of child grooming online, on SNS (Social Networking Services) and social media.

The NSPCC is one of many charities and groups imploring the government to introduce stronger protections for minors who may choose to interact online.  The charity has been very active in the pursuit of creating safer online environments for minors, warning that these cases may raise online, following the reasoning that just under a quarter of offences took place in the six months before October 2019.

Data accrued in this report covers the first 30 months after the introduction of a new offence ‘sexual communication with a child’ which came under the s.67 the Serious Crime Act 2015, this was introduced into force on the 3 April 2017.  This offence criminalises the conduct of any adult aged 18 and above who intentionally communicates with a minor under the age of sixteen with the purpose of obtaining sexual gratification and where the communication can be seen as sexual in nature or intends to encourage a sexual response from the minor.  This offence is also in place if there is an absence of a reasonable belief that the child is aged 16 or over.

Police in England and Wales have recorded over 10,000 since the introduction of this law, but only recorded the platform used by perpetrators in just over half of the cases, demonstrating a need for better-recorded practices by police of online offences.

A Facebook spokesperson said: “There is no place for grooming or child exploitation on our platforms, and we use technology to proactively find and quickly remove it.”  Though many would argue that there is evidently an issue on the various Facebook-owned platforms, despite the platitudes and official stance.

A large proportion of the cases were also attributed to Snapchat, with over 1,060 cases (18%).  Despite stating that the exploitation of young people is unacceptable, the application has arguably motivated users to add strangers, friends of friends and extended friend groups through reading contacts on users’ phones, using this information to recommend friends to other accounts.  The application also encourages the use of Snap streaks with as many users as possible through the accruing of points, so users are more motivated to add more users to raise their points on the application.

The rest of the data recorded and attributed to applications consisted of online gaming, websites, text message and others but the significant lack of recorded information by police responsible for filing and recorded the reports of sexual communications with minors have left the information partially complete.

This data only runs up to October 2019 and does not include recent trends arising from the uptake in more indoor/work from home communication between, to and from minors.  Nor does it cover how many minors may have flocked to the applications/platforms as a result.”