Men aged 18 to 26 are ‘emerging group’ of online paedophiles, police warn

Campaigners say old stereotypes must be ‘destroyed’ to stop rising offending, writes Lizzie Dearden

Warning comes after NCA reveals UK is home to at least 300,000 people who pose a sexual threat to children (PA)

British men aged between 18 and 26 are emerging as a “new group” of online paedophiles, a senior police officer has warned.

Chief Constable Simon Bailey, the national police lead for child protection, said young men were “starting to explore what child abuse imagery might look like, and they start to get their kicks from that”.

“I fear that will only get worse,” he added. “We have historically talked about those men who are predisposed to have a sexual interest in children.

“That group obviously still exists, but what we are now seeing is a group of young men who are aged between 18 and 26.”

Campaigners at the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which finds and removes illegal content, said the revelations should “destroy” previous stereotypes.

Mr Bailey was speaking to a podcast commissioned by the organisation called Pixels from a Crime Scene.

IWF chief executive Susie Hargreaves told The Independent that young men were “increasingly seeking out more extreme content, and because of the proliferation of pornography they need an extra thing to interest them”.

“We also know from our work that if you’re looking at teen porn, where adults dress as teenagers, it’s quite an easy journey from that to looking at the real thing,” she added.

“This is the first point of entry by most young men into child sexual abuse.”

The warning came after the National Crime Agency (NCA) revealed the UK is home to at least 300,000 people who pose a threat to children either online or in person.

The agency warned that the coronavirus outbreak could cause a “spike in online child sex offending” as both children and paedophiles spend more time online during the ongoing lockdown.

It said online chat monitoring showed offenders “discussing opportunities to abuse children during the Covid-19 crisis”.

Ms Hargreaves called the lockdown a “perfect storm”, adding: “People will naturally be looking for things to do and be curious. Children are online in their bedrooms and parents can’t supervise them all the time.”

An IWF report published earlier this year found that a third of child sex abuse images are originally posted online by children themselves.

Most of the “self-generated images” found were taken by girls aged between 11 and 13, who may originally have sent them voluntarily to peers, or been groomed or coerced by paedophiles – including those posing as children online.

A record of 260,400 web pages were reported to the IWF in 2019, of which 132,700 showed children being sexually abused.

Police are currently arresting more than 500 suspected child sex offenders and safeguarding around 700 children on average every month in the UK.

But several senior officers have warned that they cannot pursue all offenders because of the “overwhelming” number of online crimes, and called for a cross-system approach to prevent offending.

Mr Bailey has previously suggested that conditional cautions could be used for low-risk offenders that forces them to “confront their offending behaviour”.

In the podcast, he said: “The challenge is getting worse, and it’s getting bigger, and we have got to start being very honest about this. We have got to start debating this more in public, no matter how horrible as a subject it might be to talk about.”

The Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a child abuse prevention charity, is among those running programmes for people wanting to stop viewing indecent images and runs a helpline for people concerned about their behaviour or someone else’s.

Ms Hargreaves said authorities must start to deal with “supply and demand” by targeting young men before they develop a criminal habit of indecent images.

“What has been forever destroyed is the stereotyped of the traditional lonely old paedophile in his bedroom,” she said. “It can be anyone [and] we will only get rid of it if we change behaviour and society’s attitudes.”

The Lucy Faithfull Foundation’s Stop it Now! Helpline can be contacted online or by calling 0808 1000 900

Anyone who finds child sexual abuse material online can report it to the IWF