Nearly in one in five UK girls receive unwanted images online, poll finds

Barnardo’s says survey shows online abuse and harassment becoming ‘part of background noise of growing up’

Nearly one in five girls in the UK receive persistent, unwanted images online, according to a poll by the charity Barnardo’s, which warned that online misogyny was becoming an everyday part of childhood.

Its survey of 4,000 young people found that a quarter of girls had been called degrading names online, while one in seven 13- to 15-year-olds had been asked to send a nude photo.

Lynn Perry, the chief executive of Barnardo’s, said the survey showed that online abuse and harassment were becoming “part of the background noise of growing up”.

“These findings show how constant, corrosive and deeply embedded it is in the lives of young people today both on and offline,” she said. “Young people are telling us that the result can be harmful on all sides, from humiliation and sexualised abuse to feelings of shame and isolation.”

The results from thousands of 13- to 20-year-olds showed that a quarter of girls said they had been called degrading names online, while more than half of boys said they were expected to “act tough and not show emotion”.

A quarter of all those surveyed said they had seen a nude photo that had originally been sent privately and then shared, while a third said they had been asked to send a nude photo, including 36% of girls.

Nearly one in five girls (18%) also reported receiving repeated messages after asking the sender to stop or ignoring them, while 41% of boys agreed that if a girl posted photos online, she should expect comments about how she looked.

The survey also revealed how boys felt unable to call out their peers, with more than one in five (21%) saying their friends would not back them if they challenged sexist comments.

The majority (57%) of boys said people would think they were “boring” if they did not join in with the group’s “banter”.

Lauren Spiers, a children’s services manager for Barnardo’s Northern Ireland, said the charity was hearing stories of girls being repeatedly verbally abused in PE, and facing daily intimidation at school.

“We’re hearing about girls being followed and harassed in public, then feeling too unsafe to travel alone, and others avoiding parts of buses due to sexualised comments. Online, these attitudes are reinforced and amplified,” she said.

A third of Barnardo’s frontline practitioners said they were seeing more children affected by misogynistic content online, and an increase in child-on-child sexual abuse or children displaying problematic sexual behaviour, compared with last year.

The charity is asking the government to upgrade Ofcom’s violence against women and girls guidance to a mandatory code of practice for tech companies.

The guidance includes forcing platforms to explicitly assess how their design choices affect the safety of women and girls, and getting tech companies to publicly report how they handle user reports of misogyny and harassment.

A government consultation on an age limit for social media platforms closed on Tuesday, and ministers are expected to make a final decision on the policy within weeks.