Girls aged 11-13 more at risk of online grooming than ever before

A hard-hitting new campaign is warning teenage girls and their parents about the dangers of being groomed online by sexual predators as new figures show 11-13 year old girls are at more risk than ever before.

New analysis released on April 21 in the Internet Watch Foundation’s (IWF) annual report shows the growing risk of children, particularly girls aged 11-13, being targeted by criminal sex predators.

Predators groom, bully, and coerce their victims into filming their own sexual abuse on internet enabled devices, often in the child’s own bedrooms in their family homes. The images and videos of this abuse are then shared widely online.

IWF experts, who work internationally to find and remove child sexual abuse material from the internet, warn this abuse now, for the first time, makes up almost half of what they are finding online.

View the Internet Watch Foundation’s (IWF) annual report 2020