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how to prevent its harms through public health measures and to treat it when it breaks through the barriers. The changes to our lives that have followed – particularly national lockdowns – require us to consider whether these measures have contributed to unintended or unforeseen harms in other aspects of public health and safety. Children's health and education may have been adversely impacted by lockdown measures, but what about child maltreatment? What does the evidence tell us? There is emerging evidence of an increase in one particular form of abuse: sexual exploitation of children online. While most recorded forms of crime fell during lockdowns, recent figures in the United Kingdom show a 17% increase in online sexual crimes against children in the 6 months after the start of the first Covid-19 lockdown. Home Office data show that there were 17,699 online child sex offences recorded by police in England and Wales between April and September 2020, and most of those offences are believed to involve child sexual abuse images (NSPCC, 2021). Understanding the reasons for the rise in online offending is vital, partly because it helps us to understand sexual abuse and exploitation of children more generally and can give us some insights into how to prevent child sexual abuse and exploitation in the future. Firstly, Covid-19 increased the risk of online and offline harms to some children by increasing vulnerabilities and reducing protection. Most children and young people have been physically and socially isolated from friends and trusted adults outside the home for various periods during the pandemic. The emotional and mental health of many has been compromised, with confinement at home and changes to their routines being common features. Many have experienced anxieties living with high level of stress among parents and carers from illness, job loss and economic uncertainty (Chiesa et al., 2021). Some of these experiences of parental stress have contributed to neglect and other kinds of maltreatment, including children witnessing domestic abuse and coercive control. These issues create new vulnerabilities and exacerbate existing ones for many children. Protective factors have also been removed, such as chances for adults to notice problem behaviours at school and events. Most child sexual abuse is opportunistic rather than carefully planned, and abuse tends to follow a path of least resistance. When child vulnerabilities increase, child sexual abuse, including online abuse, is also likely to increase (Livingstone & Haddon, 2012). Secondly, lockdowns resulted in many young people spending more time online, including communicating with peers and others (Hantrais et al., 2021), often when parents and carers have limited capacity to supervise. This can leave children vulnerable to sexual exploitation by peers and adults. The sexual exploitation of children and young people for the purposes of creating child sexual abuse material for sharing online is an international trade of huge proportions. In 2019, technology companies reported over 45 million photographs and videos of children being sexually abused to the US National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, more than twice the number reported in the previous year (New York Times, 2019). Many images are from abuse within families. Increasingly, however, trade involves images where children have been sexually exploited online by peers and adults or where teenagers have shared an image with a partner, only to have it further shared without E D I T O R I A L DOI: 10.1002/cbm.2214
Harris et al. (Fri,) studied this question.