THE METROPOLITAN POLICE has launched an initiative to educate young people about ‘sexting’ and the potentially negative consequences that can result for young people involved in peer to peer creation and sharing of explicit images.

Incidents of “Sexting” or Youth Produced Sexual Imagery [YPSI] – the sharing of sexual photos and videos of and by under-18s – are increasingly being brought to police attention, and due to under-reporting, the true figures are thought to be far higher.

Figures for young people aged 14 and under (6-13 year olds) who were deemed suspects in reported sexting offences totalled 353 between Jan 1 2017-August 19 2019, and increased significantly from the start of the reporting period with 92 in 2017, rising to 151 in 2018. Already in the first six months of 2019, there had been 110 offences recorded.

CONTENT

With the exponential rise in online content, the exchange of images/videos is now a societal norm – a third of the nearly 125,000 indecent images of children online that the charity the Internet Watch Foundation took action on last year were found to have been generated by the child themselves – ‘selfies’.

Young people can find themselves the most vulnerable group when it comes to intimate images being disseminated without their consent – and many are totally unaware that they are technically breaking the law by taking, sharing or even possessing explicit images in the first place.

This was the experience of 18-year-old Eleanor* who together with mother Maggie* has joined forces with the Met this Valentine’s Day, 14 February, to support its bid to raise awareness of the devastation sexting can cause – and educate both children and parents around the law on indecent images.

Eleanor agreed to share nude images of herself over Snapchat with her long-term boyfriend at age 14, taking the extra precaution of assuring herself he had not created a screenshot of them which would have allowed him to save them on his phone. But without her knowledge, he had secretly downloaded a password-only special app that allowed him to download the images and used this to share them six months after breaking up with her.

STRESS

She had already moved from London to the south east of England for a fresh start after suffering stress and bullying, only to find herself confronted two weeks after joining her new school with the same nude images of herself – and an accompanying bombardment of messages from acquaintances and random strangers alike.

These eventually escalated into threats of blackmail from paedophiles, which led to the The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children contacting her school and police getting involved – and a prolonged investigation by police which resulted in a file being submitted to the CPS. Her boyfriend and two others who were arrested were eventually released with no further action.

*Eleanor and Maggie are pseudonyms given to protect identities.