British Police Turn to Charities for Help With Teenagers Caught Up in Online Child Abuse

Police forces in England and Wales are turning to specialist charities and partner agencies to cope with the growing number of teenagers caught up in online child abuse. Frontline officers warn that young people are going down a pathway through extreme content that could lead to real-life abusive images of children.

From Friday, new pornography laws come into force. It will be illegal to publish or possess pornography showing strangulation, incest, including some step-relations, or adults acting out fantasies of sex with under-16s. The ban is built on years of campaigning that links pornography to real-life harm, the report said.

DC Sarah Turner, part of a team of specialist officers investigating child abuse in West Mercia, said the new law will be difficult to police. She said teen is one of the most popular porn search terms, there is a huge appetite for this material, and it leads to blurred lines.

DCI Gerard Smith, who leads the West Mercia team, said there has to be a focus on the distributors in order to prevent the sharing of this material at source. His officers see the impact of violent pornography daily as they knock on doors in the early hours to arrest individuals viewing or sharing child abuse material, and Smith said the volume of arrests is going up very significantly.

Across England and Wales every month, police arrest about 1,000 people, most of them men, for online child sexual abuse offences. Turner said that on the dark web offenders used sites that resemble in style a regular porn site, and that while the search terms may be similar, the videos will be of real children being sexually abused.

DC Pep Saladino said men describe a numbness to extreme material and a desensitisation that is how they find themselves in a dark place. Officers said many of the men they meet have spiralled towards child abuse from pornography. DS Peter Wheeler said they see many young adults who started out watching pornography as children and have escalated from there, and that the focus ultimately has to be on the big porn platforms.

The West Mercia officers are looking at a pilot scheme that would send civilians to visit children who are viewing illegal material. Smith said several forces are looking at this following a successful project in Surrey called Solah. He said police do not want to criminalise children, and if there are no aggravating factors like coercing others, then the police are not the best agency to provide safeguarding advice. Some of this is sexting between teenagers, and some involves teenagers being exposed to violent images of child abuse through chat sites and forums.

New adverts from the Ministry of Justice have been circulating on social media warning extreme pornography users to delete it before 6 November or face prison sentences of up to five years. Clare McGlynn, a professor of law at Durham University, said the government must make clear that the law is about cleaning up pornography sites and removing egregious content from platforms, not about policing what individuals have on their phones.

A spokesperson for Ofcom said new legal duties on tech companies will come into force once the watchdog has updated its codes of practice and guidance, and that it is preparing to consult on this in the first half of 2027. The spokesperson said that in the first 18 months of the Online Safety Act coming into force, Ofcom has investigated more than 100 platforms and issued fines totalling more than 7 million pounds against 11 providers.

Vicky Young of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, which runs the Stop It Now helpline to encourage people to stop viewing child abuse images, welcomed the ban. She said thousands of people who contact the helpline tell them that extreme pornography has played a role in their pathway to viewing illegal sexual images of children, and that the foundation is pleased to see the ban because it will make children safer.