Police turn to charities for help with teenagers caught up in online child abuse

Police forces are turning to specialist charities and partner agencies to cope with the growing number of teenagers caught up in online child abuse.

As new pornography laws come into force, frontline officers warn that young people are going down a pathway through extreme content that could lead to real-life abusive images of children.

From Friday, it will be illegal to publish or possess pornography showing strangulation, incest – including some step-relations – or adults acting out fantasies of sex with under-16s. The ban is built on years of campaigning that links pornography to real-life harm.

“This will be difficult to police,” said DC Sarah Turner, part of a team of specialist officers investigating child abuse in West Mercia. “Teen is one of the most popular porn terms; there is a huge appetite for this material, it leads to blurred lines.”

Police and legal experts say that while the new laws are urgently needed, the government must emphasise that they are aimed at large platforms rather than “what individuals have on their phone”.

DCI Gerard Smith, who leads the West Mercia team, told the Guardian: “There has to be a focus on the distributors in order to prevent the sharing of this material at source.”

Smith’s specialist officers see the impact of violent pornography daily as they knock on doors in the early hours to arrest individuals who are viewing or sharing child abuse material. “The volume of arrests is going up very significantly,” he said.

Related: Pornography with strangulation and incest to be banned in England and Wales next month

Across England and Wales every month, police arrest about 1,000 people – most of them men – for online child sexual abuse offences.

Turner said that on the dark web, offenders used sites that “resemble in style a regular porn site”. She added: “Dark web abuse sites are heavily linked to surface websites in style and content. The search terms may be similar, even the same. But the videos will be of real children being sexually abused.”

The officers say that men report having travelled through escalating extreme pornography habits to get to “a dark place”.

“They describe a numbness to extreme material,” said DC Pep Saladino. “There is a desensitisation – that is how they find themselves in a dark place. Often the men we arrest tell us they are glad to have been caught.”

The West Mercia officers, like others across the country, see so many young people – some in their early teens – in their work that they are looking at a pilot scheme that would send civilians to visit children who are viewing illegal material.

Some of this is sexting between teenagers; some involves teenagers being exposed to violent images of child abuse through chat sites and forums.

“Several forces are looking at this following a successful project in Surrey called Solah,” said Smith. “We don’t want to criminalise children, so if there are no aggravating factors like they are coercing others, then the police are not the best agency to provide safeguarding advice.”

The officers are clear that many of the men they meet have spiralled towards child abuse from pornography.

“We see many young adults who started out watching pornography as children,” said DS Peter Wheeler. “They have escalated down the rabbit hole. Ultimately, we have to look at the big porn platforms. These are multimillion-pound companies.”

New adverts from the Ministry of Justice have been circulating on social media warning extreme pornography users to “delete it” before 6 November or face prison sentences of up to five years.

Clare McGlynn, a professor of law at Durham University and an expert on the legal regulation of pornography, wants to see the government make clear that the law was about cleaning up pornography sites.

She said: “I am concerned about misinformation online that this law is about policing what individuals have on their phones. It’s not. This is about platforms removing very egregious content.

“We are talking about the normalisation of strangulation, the normalisation of incest, of videos with girls in pigtails with teddy bears, of adults acting out child abuse and that extreme content being pushed by algorithms to the public for profit by porn platforms.”

McGlynn said social media was also an issue: “You can look up horrific material on X. What will they be doing about it tomorrow?”

A report by the Conservative peer Gabby Bertin sparked the new law. It called for a new regulatory body to oversee the pornography industry. McGlynn said the job could go to the British Board of Film Classification, adding: “Ofcom need to tell us when they will start enforcing these laws. So far they are a lethargic regulator.”

Related: ‘I didn’t start out wanting to see kids’: are porn algorithms feeding a generation of paedophiles – or creating one?

A spokesperson for Ofcom said the watchdog had to consult on any changes to its guidance and codes for platforms.

They added: “New legal duties on tech companies to deal with this content will come into force once we have updated our codes of practice and guidance – as required by law – and we’re preparing to consult on this in the first half of 2027.

“We’re already engaging with platforms to make sure they’re preparing to comply, and once in force, we’ll be holding them to account. In the first 18 months of the Online Safety Act coming into force, we’ve investigated more than 100 platforms, and issued fines totalling more than £7m against 11 providers.”

Vicky Young of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, which runs a helpline to encourage people to stop viewing child abuse images, welcomed the ban.

She said: “We’ve been raising concerns about extreme pornography for a long time. Thousands of people who contact our Stop It Now helpline tell us that extreme pornography has played a role in their pathway to viewing illegal sexual images of children. We’re pleased to see this ban because it will make children safer.”