Online child sexual abuse in England and Wales has surged by a quarter within a year, figures show, prompting police to call for social media platforms to do more to protect young people.

Becky Riggs, the acting chief constable of Staffordshire police, called for tech companies to use AI tools to automatically prevent indecent pictures from being uploaded and shared on their sites.

Riggs, who is the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for child protection and abuse, said: “I know that these platforms, with the technology that’s out there, could prevent these harms from occurring in the first instance.”

She added that technology used by children should come with inbuilt protections, such as mobile phones that allow them to only access safe platforms and websites.

Police statistics show that 122,768 child sexual exploitation offences in England and Wales were recorded in 2024, an increase of 6% on the previous year. Child sexual exploitation and abuse online increased by 26%, with 51,672 crimes recorded, which represents 42% of the total. Half the crimes were child-on-child, committed by children aged 10-17, and within this group the most common crime was sharing indecent imagery (64%).

Gareth Edwards, the head of the vulnerability knowledge and practice programme at the National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and Public Protection, said online crimes were the “fastest-growing threat” – but it is difficult to establish whether the rise was due to increased reporting from platforms in anticipation of the Online Safety Act coming into force this year, or if the crimes were becoming more prevalent. He noted that other research, including from the Youth Endowment Fund, has suggested they were growing.

He also said an emerging threat for teenagers was being blackmailed via “sextortion”, where predators threaten to release sexual images of their victim, though the report noted it was difficult to establish the scale of this threat.

Anna Edmundson, the head of policy at the NSPCC, urged the government to commission a national prevalence study to go beyond police recorded crimes “to deepen our understanding of how children and young people experience this form of harm”.

Police figures showed the most commonly used platforms in reported child exploitation and abuse offences were Snapchat (54% of reports, or 11,912); WhatsApp (8% or 1,870) – which has increased due to message encryption – and Instagram (8% or 1,705), with Facebook falling behind as its demographic gets older.

Riggs said that Snapchat had the “highest level of reporting” to law enforcement, while TikTok and X were examples of “lesser reporting”, with some platforms more proactively searching for child sexual content to share with law enforcement.

She added: “There are some disparities in particular around TikTok and there’s probably other platforms that there would be disparities for around how bold and ambitious they are in terms of safeguarding, protecting members of society, particularly children.”

The NSPCC said the publication of two reports on child sexual abuse and exploitation painted “the most comprehensive picture yet”, though it is believed that only one in 10 crimes are reported to the police.

Riggs said: “This year’s reports make one trend unmistakably clear: the rapid growth of online abuse. As more offending moves into digital spaces, we must do far more – across policing, government, industry, and civil society – to prevent harm before it reaches a child.”

The second report covered group-based child abuse, including grooming gangs. It showed that, in 2024, group-based offending accounted for 3.6% of all child sexual exploitation and abuse crimes (4,450 out of 122,768). About 17% was committed by grooming gangs, 32% in families and 24% child-on-child.

White British perpetrators comprised 78.03% of offenders versus 74.4% of the UK population, and Pakistani perpetrators made up 3.94% of offenders compared with 2.7% of the UK population.

• In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800; adult survivors can seek help at Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helpline International