Nearly half of abusers involved in group sexual exploitation of children are themselves aged between 10 and 17, police data has suggested.
A national taskforce found that 48% of 4,768 perpetrators recorded in police figures in 2023 were aged 10 to 17.
Another 430 were aged under 10, although the age of criminal responsibility in the UK is 10.
Assistant Chief Constable Becky Riggs, who is the UK lead for child protection, said officers are seeing “volatile” and “aggressive” behaviour.
She said: “Policing is not in the habit of criminalising children when they are exploring things around sex and sexuality.
“Some of the things that we are seeing now are about access to online information and people seeing a very different degree of sexual activity online.
“The type of offending that we’re seeing in this age group is far more significant in terms of aggravating factors and volatility, versus kids just being exploratory around sexual activity.
“The offending we’re seeing is significantly more volatile and aggravating and aggressive.”
Children can lie about their age to access pornography online and prevention measures should be strengthened to stop this, she said.
“It’s not too difficult as a child to go on to different sites, and also pretending their age is significantly older than it is, and then get access to a lot of information that doesn’t have any safeguards around it,” Ms Riggs added.
Richard Fewkes, director of the National Police Chiefs’ Council child sexual exploitation taskforce, said what some children have seen online has “normalised” harmful behaviour.
Data was gathered from 44 police forces in England and Wales.
A total of 4,228 crimes linked to group sexual exploitation of children were recorded.
The most commonly recorded offence was rape of a child (1,702 or 40%), then sexual assault (1,200 or 28%), then sexual activity involving a child (1,094 or 26%), with the remaining 232, or 6%, classed as other.
Around three-quarters of victims were female and around three-quarters of perpetrators were male.
