I've Spent 35 Years In Policing. I've Never Seen A Threat To Children Escalate Like This

The useful part

In three and a half decades working in policing, I have seen the landscape of child abuse change many times. I have watched technology transform both the scale of the threat and the complexity of the response. I have sat with survivors and with their families, and I know and understand too well what this harm does.

How it works

• The online sexual abuse of children is, in the most clinical and precise sense of the word, a pandemic.
• Edinburgh – conducting the first global estimate of its kind – found that 300 million young people are victims of technology-facilitated sexual abuse and exploitation every 12 months.
• They are what is happening to children right now, in every country, in every community.
• Foundation recorded a 26,000% rise in child sexual abuse videos between 2024 and 2025.
• There are hundreds of millions of child sexual abuse images in circulation, and AI is fuelling the numbers as well as the demand.

Details worth keeping

I have rarely seen anything escalate as fast as this.