Online Specialists Help Children At Risk Of Abuse

About 100 children a month are being rescued from physical and sexual abuse after contacting specialist police officers online, The Times has learnt.

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) receives dozens of e-mails a day from children who have fears about someone they have spoken to online and worries about images that they have seen.

On average, officers will mark four of these contacts a “level one” category, meaning that urgent action needs to be taken: the child could be about to meet a suspected paedophile, about to be abused or is thinking of committing suicide because of abuse.

Within hours of such messages being received police and social welfare officers will have been contacted by CEOP and sent to see the child.

Children can contact the centre through a series of clickthroughs, or prominent links, that appear on some, but not all, social networking sites. They are sent to the centre’s site where they can reveal their worries.

A senior police source said: “The Government should make it compulsory for online businesses that allow children to communicate with each other to have a very visible clickthrough facility to CEOP, and industry should step up to the plate and adopt the approach because it makes sense all round.”

Ministers at the Department for Children, Schools and Families are also being urged to do more to protect children from online predators.The Home Office will soon announce guidelines to help to safeguard children, but senior officers want the Government to make teaching children how to be safe online part of the national curriculum for all age groups.

Officials from the centre form part of the Home Secretary’s taskforce on education. A spokeswoman for the centre said: “We are trying to influence things from the inside, but even if it was agreed today it may still take two years to get it onto the curriculum. As part of the general safety of children we want them to be able to report inappropriate contact very easily with one clickthrough that is very visible on any site a child may use and not have to go through loads of pages.”

Over the past year CEOP workers have been giving talks to schools about the dangers that children could face on the internet. Anecdotal evidence suggests that at least one child from a quarter of all schools visited will approach a worker and say they are being, or have been, abused.

The centre has launched a “Think U Know” campaign on its website that answers many questions for children and tells them how to report any fears they have or any disturbing images they have seen.

As well as safeguarding children, the centre works to locate perpetrators and track registered offenders who have failed to comply with their notification requirements under the Sexual Offences Act. This includes tracking offenders who travel abroad and sending intelligence to overseas forces. Pictures of the most-wanted are posted on the centre’s website.