Schoolgirls are facing an increasing wave of online abuse and harassment from men who have viewed extreme pornography, police warned today — amid the “terrifying” impact of misogynistic influencers.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council said crimes committed against child victims online included threats to share intimate photos or videos as well as harassment and abuse.
It said that children aged 10 to 15 represented the age group most likely to fall victim to such online offending and that the arrival of artificial intelligence risked worsening the problem.
It added that unregulated access to pornography by boys and men and the malign impact of influencers such as Andrew Tate were also fuelling the rapid growth in the online targeting of women and girls.
The warning came as the police chiefs set out details in a new report on an “epidemic” of violence against women and girls with 3,000 offences being committed against them each day.
The report also discloses a 37 per cent rise between 2018 and 2023 in the number of such crimes being recorded by forces and states that one in 20 adults, mostly men, are perpetrators each year.
Unveiling the findings today, Deputy Chief Constable Maggie Blyth, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead on violence against women, said officers were particularly concerned about the fast-rising volume of online offending against women and girls and the way in which boys and young men were being drawn into criminal behaviour. “We are concerned at the level of online harm, the level of stalking and harassment, the level of harmful content in particular around serious pornography that young people are exposed to increasingly through access to iPhones, computers etc,” she said.
“Or the use of criminality from those perpetrators that can use the online space to perpetrate and expose their crimes on young people.”
She added: “We know that some of this is also linked to radicalisation of young people online, we know the influencers, Andrew Tate, the element of influencing of particularly boys, is quite terrifying.”
Today’s report says that increased complexity of tackling online violence against women requires government regulation, warning that police “cannot provide the appropriate solution to either control or regulate people’s safe use of online platforms and technology”.
Other figures in today’s report state that two million women a year experience harassment and that 1.4 million suffer domestic abuse.
The report says that there has also been an estimated 435 per cent increase in child sexual abuse and exploitation offences between 2013 and 2022 with the number of such crimes rising from just over 20,000 to nearly 107,000 a year.
Andrew Tate is a British-American influencer renowned for his misogynistic views with a large online following who became famous after appearing on the TV show Big Brother.
He is facing trial in Romania over allegations, which he denies, of rape, human trafficking and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women.
Meanwhile, the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has said abusers are “attracted to professions like policing”.
Louisa Rolfe told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “It is a sad reality that abusers are attracted to professions like policing, but policing is not alone.”
