There is a podcast made by the internet watch foundation (Great organisation look them up) - in one episode the Police Chief Commissioner responsible for child sex abuse says he was once watching a video of a child being abused that had been found being shared online by thousands of people. In the background the parent can be heard calling the child down for tea. They have absolutely no idea what their child is doing - directly communicating with paedophiles.
We have put children in a position online which we would NEVER do in the real world.
Would you let your child go into a sex shop (I say as a kid of the 80s) - nope. Would you let them into a casino, or let them go out into bars late at night where every ten minutes predatory paedophiles come up to them or trick them into revealing information about themselves that make them vulnerable to blackmail?
If you let your child roam around bars at night you would be visited by social services. yet parents let their children use the internet and do not monitor what is happening. I don't even blame parents it is hard to get your head around how serious the dangers are.
A very common tactic of paedophiles (many recent high profile cases show this, look on the National Crime Agency website for info) - is to trick a child into sharing an image - ie. they pretend to be another child/ a friend/ a boyfriend/ girlfriend their own age, someone who likes them and chats with them - once they have done that the child is putty in their hands. The child is terrified to tell anybody as they are told if they do the images will be shared - the child is sick with shame and fear.
Thousands and thousands of children go through this in the UK alone each year. Hundreds of children are safeguarded each month by UK police in relation to online sex abuse.
We are utterly failing our children both here in the Uk and globally that we allow this to continue.
The internet is a cess pit of abusers, groomers and outright paedophiles
I promise you nothing I could say here would even be in the slightest an exaggeration. The UK police have said themselves (google it) that they are completely overwhelmed by the online child sex abuse crisis.
The Times had a great report recently by their education correspondent - she went onto the "metaverse" - it was a press trip! She was given the VR headset by 'Meta' - yet within minutes she was being harassed. She met children in the VR world who were being harassed by paedophiles - this was literally within minutes of going online.