A large rise in reported child abuse images offences has been recorded by Essex Police.

In 2017/18 the force recorded 767 offences, a 34 per cent increase compared to the year before.

The NSPCC is warning that offenders are using social networks to target children for abuse online, grooming and manipulating them into sending naked images.

As a result the charity is calling on Government to introduce an independent regulator to hold social networks to account and tackle grooming, in a campaign it calls the Wild West Web.

Tony Stower, NSPCC’s head of child safety online, said: “Every one of these images represents a real child who has been groomed and abused to supply the demand of this appalling trade.

“The lack of adequate protections on social networks has given offenders all too easy access to children to target and abuse. This is the last chance saloon for social networks on whose platforms this abuse is often taking place.

“Our Wild West Web campaign is calling on Government to introduce a tough independent regulator to hold social networks to account and tackle grooming to cut off supply of these images at source.”

Last month, an NSPCC survey of 40,000 young people revealed an average of one in 50 schoolchildren had sent a nude or semi-nude image to an adult[1].

While UK authorities work to remove child abuse images from the internet new images are constantly uploaded.

In 2017, the Internet Watch Foundation identified over 78,000 URLs containing child sexual abuse images3.