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<p>We have already made significant progress in combating online child sex abuse and
exploitation, but it’s clear that we have much, much more to do.</p><p>The WePROTECT
Global Alliance Global Threat Assessment 2018 highlighted that the scale, complexity
and danger of the online child sexual abuse threat has increased over the past three
years. This has been facilitated through the ubiquity of mobile devices, anonymous
access and encryption.</p><p>In 2017, 82,109 individual industry referrals were received
by the National Crime Agency (NCA), from the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children (NCMEC), a 700% increase since 2013.</p><p>The Government has invested £7.5m
in a ground-breaking Centre of Expertise to identify, generate, and share high-quality
evidence of what works to prevent and tackle child sexual abuse and exploitation.</p><p>The
Centre published a revised assessment of the scale and nature of child sexual abuse
in August 2018, which highlighted that online is a new context for child sexual abuse
and exploitation and is generating new forms of abuse which are difficult to track
accurately. Measuring the scale of abuse in the UK will be an ongoing priority for
the Centre.</p>
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