A study to fill a gap in the evidence
A new study is to investigate harmful messaging between adults and children online, looking in detail at a form of contact that parents, teachers and regulators know exists, but about which the public evidence remains incomplete. The BBC has reported the study, which will examine how such messaging happens, who it affects, and what harm it causes, at a time when concern about children's online safety in the UK is running high and new legal duties on platforms are still bedding in.
The announcement matters because messaging is different from public posting. A harmful post on a public feed can be seen, reported and removed, and researchers can study it at scale. A private message, by contrast, is visible only to sender and recipient, which makes it harder to measure, harder to moderate, and harder for adults around a child to notice. A study designed specifically around messaging therefore addresses a blind spot, rather than repeating research that already exists on public content. That distinction will shape what the study can usefully find, and how its results should be read.
The study has been commissioned by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) and will be carried out by Anglia Ruskin University, based in Cambridge and Chelmsford. It will use an anonymous online survey of about 1,500 young people aged 12 to 18 in UK secondary schools to examine the prevalence, nature and circumstances of sexual communication between children and adults through direct messaging platforms, and how such contact can lead to exploitation. Its aim is to deepen understanding of how these harms occur and what can be done to prevent grooming and exploitation, and the work will support the NSPCC's advocacy with Ofcom and the government on stronger online protections for children. No results have been published yet, because the study is newly commissioned, and no timetable for results was stated in the BBC report. The account below therefore describes the study's aims, not results, alongside the wider, verified evidence about children's experiences of harmful messaging, from the Office for National Statistics, Ofcom and the NSPCC. Readers can follow related coverage in our health section.
What existing UK data already shows
Even without the new study's results, the scale of the problem is not in doubt. The Office for National Statistics, in its Children's Crime Survey for England and Wales for the year ending February 2026, estimated that 12 percent of children aged 13 to 15 received at least one sexual message in the previous 12 months. Girls, at 13 percent, were slightly more likely than boys, at 10 percent, to have received such a message. Of the children who received sexual messages, a quarter had received them more than 10 times.
The same survey breaks down who sent those messages, and the breakdown is important for understanding why adult-child messaging deserves separate study. Most children who received sexual messages received them from children about their own age, at 71 percent. Nearly a quarter received them from people a few years older but still under 18. Around one in five, 19 percent, received them from adults aged 18 and over. Among girls, a quarter received sexual messages from someone aged 18 or over, compared with around one in 10 boys. The most common formats were comments or texts, at 84 percent, followed by photos at 51 percent and videos at 26 percent. Those figures describe sexual messages in general, not only messages from adults, but they show that adult senders form a significant minority of the problem, and that girls are disproportionately affected.
Ofcom's earlier research into children's experiences of sexualised messages online adds qualitative depth to those numbers. It focused on children receiving sexualised messages from adults aged 18 and over, and it documented how contact that begins with flattery can escalate into pressure and threats. In one account reported by Ofcom, a child aged 14 to 17 described grooming that began on a gaming platform before moving to a private messaging app, where flattery gave way to pressure to send images, followed by threats. Professionals interviewed for the research described a pattern of sextortion, in which teenage boys in particular were targeted with flattery or fake images, then blackmailed with demands for money or further images under threat of publication. Those accounts are not statistics, but they explain why researchers want to understand the sequence of messages, not just count them.
Why private messaging is the hard part
The NSPCC has warned that perpetrators are able to move conversations from public forums, such as social media or gaming platforms, into private messaging spaces or encrypted channels, where messages are only accessible to sender and recipient. Research commissioned by the NSPCC, published in November 2025 and carried out by PUBLIC, found that regulatory gaps in the Online Safety Act mean private messaging services have fewer protections for children than public spaces, leading to fears that harms will migrate from public spaces into private ones.
That warning frames the central challenge for any study of adult-child messaging. If researchers only look at public posts, they will miss the very conversations where harm is most likely to escalate. If they rely only on surveys, they will learn that harm happened, but not how a conversation unfolded, what warning signs appeared early, or at what point a child might have been helped. A study that combines surveys with careful analysis of how messaging works, including interviews with young people, parents and professionals, could therefore add something genuinely new, even if it cannot read private messages directly. Ethical research in this area must protect participants, avoid re-traumatising young people, and never seek to access a child's private messages without proper consent and safeguards. Those constraints limit what any study can do, and they should be kept in mind when its findings appear.
The policy context has also shifted. Children's safety duties under the Online Safety Act came into force in July 2025, requiring platforms to protect children from harmful content, including pornography, serious violence, material about suicide, racism, misogyny and bullying. Ofcom's first statutory review of content harmful to children, published on 22 October 2026, found that most children in the UK said they had encountered at least one form of harmful content online within a four week period, and that at a total level there was no significant change in exposure during the first nine months after those duties took effect. That review looked at harmful content broadly, not only at messaging, and it was careful to note that it did not assess whether individual platforms were complying with the Act. Its message, however, was clear: the new duties have not yet produced a measurable fall in children's exposure to harm, and more evidence about where harm happens is needed.
Three teenagers walking outdoors together
Credit: Jean-Pierre Bazard via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0. Illustrative image.
What a good study should be able to answer
A useful study of harmful adult-child messaging would need to answer several distinct questions, and it is worth setting them out now, so that readers can judge the eventual findings fairly. First, how common is it, and for whom? The ONS figures give a national picture for sexual messages in general, but a focused study could break that down by age, gender, platform and type of message, and could distinguish one-off unwanted contact from sustained, coercive exchanges.
Second, how do conversations develop? Grooming rarely begins with an explicit request. Research consistently describes a pattern of attention, flattery, migration to a more private channel, and then pressure, and understanding that sequence could help platforms and parents spot risk earlier. Third, what harm follows, and for how long? Harm is not only immediate distress. Young people interviewed in earlier research described guilt, shame, anxiety and fear that lasted well beyond the messages themselves, and some described images being shared without consent among peers, compounding the original harm.
Fourth, what helps? That question covers technical tools, such as detection of suspicious patterns without reading private messages, as well as human factors, such as whether a child felt able to tell a trusted adult, and what happened when they did. The NSPCC has recommended tools that can scan for nude images and identify abuse material before it is shared, metadata analysis to spot patterns such as adults repeatedly contacting large numbers of children, and barriers on adult profiles engaging children, such as restrictions on who they can search and how many people they can contact. A new study could test which of those ideas young people themselves find acceptable and workable, rather than assuming adults know best.
Finally, a good study should be honest about its limits. It will not be able to observe private messages directly at scale, and it will depend on what young people are willing to share. Its findings will describe patterns and risks, not certainties about any individual child, and they should not be used to blame young people for contact initiated by adults. Those cautions apply to all research in this field, and they are a strength, not a weakness, when stated openly.
What parents, schools and platforms can do now
While this research goes ahead, the existing evidence already points to practical steps. Parents and carers can talk openly and regularly with children about online contact, including the possibility that someone who seems friendly may not be who they claim to be, and that moving a conversation from a game or public forum to a private app is a moment to pause and think. Children should know that they can tell a trusted adult about unwanted messages without fear of losing their device or being punished, since fear of punishment is a known barrier to disclosure.
Schools can build that conversation into relationships and sex education and digital literacy, focusing on consent, image sharing and what to do if an image is shared without permission. Platforms, for their part, are now under legal duties to assess and manage risks to children, and Ofcom has made clear that it expects stronger protections, including better age assurance and safer design for private messaging features. Whether those duties translate into safer experiences will depend on enforcement and on evidence, which is where a dedicated messaging study could help.
It is also important to keep proportion in view. Most online contact between young people is ordinary, social and positive, and most adults who interact with children online do so in legitimate roles, as family, teachers, coaches or youth workers. The study's focus is harmful messaging, not all adult-child contact, and conflating the two would risk damaging the trusted relationships that actually protect children. The aim, as with all child safety research, is to make the online world safer by design, so that children can enjoy its benefits without facing risks that adults have failed to address. For wider context, see our news coverage, our science section, and the homepage. Information about this site is on our about page, and our contact page carries a way to reach us.
