Engagement in the Digital Neighbourhood

With neighbourhood policing featuring high on the new government’s agenda, the time has never been better to talk about Digital Youth Engagement in the ‘Digital Neighbourhood’, where the vast majority of our young people spend a lot of their time.

There are over 4 million 13-17 year olds in the UK, 98% of whom own a smartphone, and 97% of whom have a social media profile. The average amount of time that this cohort spend online is two to three hours per day. In this Digital Neighbourhood, young people are hanging out with friends, playing games, sharing jokes, buying and selling stuff, learning new languages, and discovering how people all over the world are living their lives. But, they're also increasingly at risk of being robbed, scammed, abused or exploited.

According to Childlight (a global NGO, working to understand the prevalence, nature and scale of child sexual exploitation and abuse [CSEA]), 1 in 8 children globally have been subjected to online solicitation in the last 12 months,  and 1 in 8 children have experienced non-consensual taking, sharing and/or exposure to sexual images and videos in the last 12 months. In addition to the scale of the problem, there is the issue of the rate at which it is growing. By way of example, in 2023, the CyberTipline (a US-based Child Sexual Exploitation reporting service) received more than 186,800 reports of what it describes as ‘online enticement’, the category that includes sextortion. In 2024, to October 5, NCMEC has received more than 456,000 reports of ‘online enticement’.

If young people were exposed to this level of risk or harm in a geographic area, like a local park, policing would make sure it allocated resources to make those spaces safe for young people. The difficulty with the Digital Neighbourhood, is that it is non-geographic and, as such, a geographic, or force-level response isn’t necessarily appropriate or effective.

The good news about sextortion, to take one example, is that it is easily preventable:

There’s a massive body of evidence which indicates that, if you tell every 14 to 17-year-old child in the country that the beautiful stranger who pops up in their DMs, and who has been flattering them for 20 minutes, sending and asking for nudes, is more likely to be an organised criminal who’s just sent hundreds of those messages out, those children are much less vulnerable to sending images and then being extorted for those.

Digital Youth Engagement, is a crucial public health approach to child protection. By building trust and confidence through Procedurally Just engagement, young people are more likely to listen to the advice and education available. Crucially, if they miss the information and things still go wrong, we hope they will trust policing enough to come to us when they need help and safeguarding.