Women As Young As Six Sexting Throughout Pandemic, Cyber Security Research Suggests
New research shows that girls as young as 6 communicate in explicit ways during the coronavirus pandemic. Parents were provided with one million copies of a cyber security app on the Government''s site.
SafeToNet has reported that"sexts" or "sexts" written by children in the UK have increased 183% during lockdown, when compared to before these measures were imposed. There''s also been a 55% increase in sexts written during school times.
The start-up in the UK analysed and filtered 70 million potentially harmful messages sent to children through their safeguarding app. It found that most of messages were sent by girls.
13-year-old girls and 11-year-old boys attempted to send most sexts, or messages deemed as cyberbullying. However, the app stopped messages sent by girls who were as young as 6 years and nine years old.
The coronavirus lockdown that took place in the UK saw 25 percent of UK adults spend their time online.
Parents shocked after ITV News uncovers inappropriate videos on TikTok
The number of cyber-bullying posts found in the UK decreased dramatically following the lockdown that was imposed. However, the rates at Sunday evening schools have started to increase, which indicates a sense of anxiety for the week ahead.
According to data, the number of aggressive messages that were discovered and blocked has increased by 47 percent since the lockdown measures were lifted.
The founder Richard Pursey believes it is the only application of its kind that can detect threats to children in real-time. He also said security software such as theirs should be on every child''s phone.
It was developed in consultation with more that 2,000 children. It makes use of artificial intelligence and behavioral analytics to keep in balance privacy rights and the "primal need" of parents to ensure their child is safe.
The company, via the SafeToNet Foundation, is offering UK parents one million free licenses that can be downloaded through a link on the government''s online safety advice page beginning on Thursday.
According to Mr Pursey (a father of four children aged 58 from Kensington, West London) the children are killing themselves every day because of online activities. He claimed that he had been "scarred" after having viewed some of the videos.
He added: "This is happening pretty often every day across the globe and I''m aware that it''s happening.
"And I don’t know them, but I know today that some children will end up taking the lives of their parents."
SEXTING
"And it''s due to things like bullying and sexting, not necessarily due to grooming children, it''s simply because they are rude to kids."
He added: "I know that well as I can see, from the stats on my platform, the massive amount of harmful content we''re filtering, so we''re hopefully stopping this from happening but, of course there are many children on the planet is using our platform."
Mr Pursey claimed to have seen footage of an 11-year-old girl murdering herself and a man blowing his head using an automatic rifle, which was used by UK children.
He stated: "When I press the button to view this content because I have to examine it in order to verify my software and filter it, I''m hanging on, I''m bracing myself ready to see what I see. It''s left me scarred.
