More children saved from abuse

A record number of children have been rescued from paedophiles prowling the internet in the UK for the fifth consecutive year, a specialist police unit has said.

More than 1,000 children have been safeguarded or protected, including 414 in the last 12 months alone, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre said.

It comes as the agency’s figures show it has dismantled more than 394 high-risk sex offender networks since it was set up in 2006 tasked with tracking online paedophiles and bringing them to court.

Of these, a record 132 networks have been dismantled in the last year as the unit’s actions also led to a record 513 arrests, taking the total number of suspected paedophiles it has helped arrest in the last five years to 1,644.

But Peter Davies, CEOP’s chief executive officer, warned the battle was far from over. “Crimes against children are for me the most horrendous crimes and too many times the victim suffers in silence,” he said.

“We need to encourage ever more reporting and understanding, we need to work to prevent the crime happening in the first place and we need to pursue the offender no matter how complex the methods they use to hide their activity.”