Hundreds of Children Safeguarded from Online Predators This Year 226 children have been safeguard - Tuesday 03 September 2019

By Hartlepool Alert

Hundreds of Children Safeguarded from Online Predators This Year 226 children have been safeguarded so far this year across Cleveland by officers working in the Paedophile Online Investigation Team (POLIT). Specialist officers from the highlytrained team investigate online child grooming, indecent images of children, and offences of causinginciting children to engage in sexual activity online. Figures also show that so far this year, 79 people have been arrested and 14 people spoken to voluntarily, 46 warrants have been executed at addresses across Cleveland, 64 referrals have been made to social services and 7805 children and parents have taken part in training about how to stay safe online. POLIT officers work alongside school liaison officers to deliver important training on how children can stay safe online and how parents can take steps to help prevent their children being targeted by paedophiles online. The team works closely with other Forces and the National Crime Agency to crackdown on internet paedophile rings. There have been a number of successful convictions at court this year, following intensive and lengthy investigations carried out by the team. Some examples of these include a man and woman who had discussed online sexually abusing the womans young son a man in possession of a paedophile manual and thousands of indecent images of children and two men who chatted online before making and distributing indecent images of children. Detective Sergeant Kevin Carter, from POLIT, said The team works hard all year round to safeguard children and help raise awareness of how to keep children safe from being targeted by online predators. Every case is harrowing and the job can be tough. Our officers receive psychological support to help them deal with the traumatic nature of their role, but the team are determined to help protect children from being targeted online. These types of offences mainly take place behind closed doors and it is the hard work of our team that brings these offences out in the open in order to bring people to justice. Members of the public can also assist us by reporting anything that they think may be suspicious, therefore providing police with all important intelligence and sharing our messages on how to keep children safe online.

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