Online child abuse

Online child abuse rising during lockdown warn police

Data gathered by the BBC reveals demand for abuse imagery has shot up.

Reports of obscene online material more than doubled globally to more than four million between March and April.

The US-based Center for Missing and Exploited Children said some of that rise related to one especially horrific and widely-circulated video.

In the UK, where 300,000 people are considered a threat to children, there were nearly nine million attempts in the last month to access child sexual abuse websites which had been previously blocked by the Internet Watch Foundation.