Nellie was 14 and in a relationship when she was asked to send nude images over Snapchat.
She did it, in part, because it was “so normalised” among her friends to send nudes that she didn’t think too much about it.
She also knew that if the images were saved or screenshotted on Snapchat, she’d get an alert. Except she didn’t.
The person she’d sent them to used an external app to download the pictures, so she didn’t get any notification.
Six months later, they’d broken up, and she’d moved to a different part of the country. That’s when the messages started.
“I was waiting to go to school in the morning and I got a message from someone that I used to go to school with saying, ‘I just thought you should know this is what’s being sent around’, and sent me an image of myself.”
Within a week, she was getting messages from people every day saying intimate images of her were being shared around the school.
“I was so embarrassed and ashamed and really insecure that all these people would see me in such a vulnerable way,” Nellie, now 24, told Sky News.
Soon, it escalated – she was contacted by a stranger who threatened to blackmail her if she didn’t send more images.
“It was really, really scary because I didn’t know who they were, I didn’t know how they’d got the photos. I didn’t know how genuine they were in their threat and if they were going to share them further.”
Nellie realised the situation had spiralled out of control and called Childline, the NSPCC’s helpline for young people.
She felt she had no one else to speak to, not wanting to tell her parents or school that she’d sent the pictures in the first place.
Childline advised her to contact CEOP, the police agency that works to stop online child exploitation. The agency was so concerned she would become a target for paedophiles and blackmailers, they contacted Nellie’s school.
“I was called into the nurse’s office, she told me that they’d received this email and that my mum was on her way in.
“The next day we phoned the police and made a report.”
The police investigation took two years, during which Nellie surrendered her phone for evidence and tried to carry on with her GCSEs and then A-levels.
Eventually, the police phoned. There wasn’t enough evidence for the CPS to prosecute; the case was being dropped.
Nellie, despite being drained and disappointed after the whole ordeal, decided to start speaking out for other people in her situation.
Police ‘getting 100 reports a day’ of child sex abuse images
She was speaking to us as the NSPCC released new data that showed a 9% increase in the number of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) crimes.
“Our data is showing that police forces across the UK have had more than 37,000 child sexual abuse image offences reported to them,” Chris Sherwood, chief executive of the NSPCC, told Sky News.
“This means that police forces across the UK are [getting] around 100 reports per day.”
Of the 10,811 crimes where a platform could be identified, more than 40% of the crimes took place on Snapchat.
The social media company has repeatedly topped the NSPCC’s reports for where this kind of crime is happening and in December was named the worst social media app for child abuse offences in police data.
Nellie suggested that was inevitable.
“You can’t give a social media platform to a load of kids where the whole premise of it is that you can send an image and it disappears and expect no wrongdoing. That’s irresponsible,” she said.
The increasing number of CSAM crimes could partially be down to reporting; companies have increased responsibilities to report child exploitation to the authorities.
However, the NSPCC suggests these figures are just the tip of the iceberg. “We know there’ll be many thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of other offences that have gone unreported,” said Mr Sherwood.
But there is good news, according to the charity; it believes the problem can be solved “relatively easily”.
“We can install device-level protections on children and young people’s smartphones so that these images can’t be shared,” said Mr Sherwood.
The NSPCC is calling on phone makers and social media companies to put protections in place to stop CSAM being created and shared from the outset – and if they fail to do so, it wants the government to step in and “force” the companies to take action.
‘Deeply shocking’
The minister for safeguarding, Jess Phillips, called the sexual abuse of children online “one of the most disturbing crimes of our time”.
“The scale of offending revealed here is nothing short of deeply shocking,” she said.
“We have committed to making it impossible for children in the UK to take, share or view nude images, and have already announced a ban on so‑called ‘nudification’ apps to stop abusive images being created and spread in the first place.”
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Sky News asked Snapchat for responses to both the NSPCC’s new data and Nellie’s story. A spokesperson for the company said:
“We work closely with NSPCC and police to help keep our platform safe and combat child sexual exploitation.
“This report does not accurately reflect our efforts to tackle these horrific crimes and fails to recognise that information sent to police (through what are known as CyberTips) helps support their investigations to bring criminals to justice.
“We will continue to do our part because we know that seriously addressing these issues requires collaboration from stakeholders across many segments of our society, including law enforcement, experts, parents, educators, advocates and tech companies.”
