Parents and Carers are being urged to supervise their children online as the Australian Federal Police (AFP) reveals, for the first time, the extent of young children posting explicit content.
The AFP-led Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE) Commander Helen Schneider said the ACCCE received, on average, five to 10 reports every week about children as young as five who had filmed or photographed themselves naked, sometimes displaying sexually explicit behaviour, and posted the content online, without adult criminality or involvement.
She said police usually saw the number of reports received of children uploading videos or images to social media platforms increase by up to 20 per cent after the school holidays, when children had spent more time online.
“In multiple cases, children filmed and uploaded videos of themselves naked by accident and they have done this from a parent’s phone or computer left unattended,” Commander Schneider said.
“It is important parents lock shared devices and supervise their children while they are online,” she said.
“While these images are also often taken and shared unintentionally by minors, the flow-on effects can be damaging with content reaching the hands of child sex offenders.
“Offenders often visit popular social media platforms looking for self-produced content and share it with other offenders, or may even try to contact the child to groom them to create more extreme content.”
Commander Schneider said children must be reminded about what content was appropriate to share online and to always seek help from a trusted adult if something made them feel unsafe.
She said that while offenders sextorting teenagers for financial gain had been a concerning trend in the past year, AFP child protection investigators had conducted welfare checks on multiple families across Australia about photos or videos showing a child naked or displaying sexual behaviours that appear to be self-generated by the child and which were found to have been posted without adult involvement.
“When we receive an alert about a video or image appearing on a social media platform, we need to check who has created and posted it and make sure the child involved is safe,” Commander Schneider said.
“Often parents do not know what their child has done – the only warning may be a social media account being shut down – and the child isn’t aware of the implications.”
She urged parents to remind their children never to share any personal information online with people they have never met and trust in person.
“Parents, caregivers and the community are the first line of defence when it comes to protecting children,” Commander Schneider said.
