Violent pornography is “fundamentally changing” the views of young boys about sex, the home secretary has said as new figures reveal police are receiving more reports of rape from 14-year-old girls than any other age group.
In an interview with The Times, Yvette Cooper said the graphic nature of material boys are now exposed to is influencing the way they treat girls and women. She said schools and parents were failing to teach young boys what sexual behaviour was acceptable.
Figures obtained by The Times reveal that nearly a third of female rapes reported to the police involved girls aged 18 and under in the year to March.
Data on female rape victims disclosed by 31 of the 43 police forces in England and Wales show that 1,458 girls aged 14 reported a rape to the police in 2023-24, more than any other age group. The figures suggest that rape victims are getting younger, as in the previous year the largest group reporting the crime were 15-year-olds.
Of the total 31,603 rapes reported by female victims to the 31 police forces, 9,928 involved girls aged 18 and under.
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Cooper said the revelation that 14-year-olds were now accounting for the largest age group of female rape victims was “the most disturbing figure”.
“What it also shows is that that age has been getting younger as well and I think it shows teenage girls being badly let down and I think the lack of strong prevention work but also the pressures that we’re seeing online on young men and the urgency really of this.”
Explaining what she believed was behind the trend, Cooper said: “The sorts of things young men are seeing online … the kinds of material that we’re seeing online, the way in which, compared to ten years ago, compared to 20 years ago, this has fundamentally changed in terms of what boys are growing up with, what girls are growing up seeing online but also the lack of the way in which the response in schools, the response in communities, the response in families is just not keeping up with that.”
In her interview with The Times, the home secretary also hit out at WhatsApp and other social media companies for failing in their “moral obligation” to protect children. She accused them of prioritising their profits while failing to stop images of child abuse being shared on their platforms.
Cooper made the comments in response to the revelations that Huw Edwards, the disgraced former BBC News presenter, viewed images of child abuse on WhatsApp, the encrypted messaging platform owned by Meta.
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She said: “We do expect all social media companies to work with us, to work with the police on making sure … that material is identified and is removed.
“And we expect Meta, we expect all social media companies to do this. There is a huge moral obligation on social media platforms who obviously make profit from the platforms.”
On Saturday Cooper will announce support for the National Centre for Public Protection, set up in the past year, which she wants to help her mission of “ruthlessly pursuing” perpetrators of violence against women and girls across the country to tackle what she describes as a “national emergency” of domestic violence and sexual offences.
She wants the centre to play a key role in meeting Cooper’s pledge that the police will take violence against women and girls as seriously as they take terrorism. It sits within the College of Policing and has access to more than 4,500 new officers trained in the specialist skills to investigate the complexities of violence against women and girls.
The centre, led by Maggie Blyth, deputy chief executive of the College of Policing and the national police lead for tackling male-perpetrated violence towards women, will use counter-terrorism style data analysis and covert tactics to target the most serious offenders.
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It will start by identifying and targeting the 1,000 men who pose the greatest danger to women and girls across the country and provide police forces with the specialist training, expertise and technical capability needed to improve investigations into violence committed by men.
Cooper wants the centre to help forces get much smarter in identifying, monitoring and targeting high-risk offenders. This will include a new national standard for using predictive and proactive technology.
They are the latest measures — including specialist rape courts and installing domestic abuse investigators in each 999 police control room — designed to deliver on Labour’s election manifesto pledge to halve the rates of violence against women and girls within the next decade, which forms part of Sir Keir Starmer’s “safer streets” mission.
Labour said it would also attempt to change boys’ attitudes towards women through its plans to set up a network of Young Futures hubs. Backed by £100 million a year, the hubs will provide targeted programmes in every area to identify the young people most at risk of being drawn into violent crime, including sexual crime, and build a package of support that responds to the challenges they face, including mental health problems.
She said: “If we’re seeing this as a ten-year mission we have to make sure that the girls and boys who are starting primary school at the moment are not being let down in the same way in ten years time and that’s why this has to be a mission really for the whole of government.”
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In a speech to the Labour Party’s women’s conference in Liverpool, Cooper will say: “On my watch, if you hurt and abuse women, the police will be after you. The era of impunity is over. I want police officers to use every tool in their arsenal. And to strain every sinew to keep women safe.”
A spokesman for WhatsApp said: “End-to-end encryption is one of the most important technologies to keep everyone safe online, including young people. We know people, including journalists, activists and politicians, don’t want us reading their private messages so we have developed robust safety measures to prevent, detect and combat abuse while maintaining online security.
“This includes the ability to report directly to WhatsApp so we can ban any user who shares this heinous material. Other messaging apps don’t have the safety measures we have developed.”
