The NSPCC has documented an 89% increase in recorded online grooming offences against children over a six-year period, with more than 7,000 cases recorded in 2023/24 alone. Nearly half of these offences occurred on Snapchat, and the data reveals disproportionate targeting of girls. The figures represent a categorical failure of platform self-regulation and retrospective enforcement models that depend on victims reporting abuse after the fact, leaving children exposed to predatory contact that reaches them before any protective intervention can occur.
A substantial proportion of these 7,000 grooming cases could have been intercepted before children were ever contacted. Guardii's anti-grooming detection module—part of an AI-driven online-safety platform backed by Startmate and operating as a Meta Business Partner—monitors children's direct messages in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms, identifies threat patterns indicative of predatory behaviour, and blocks or flags hostile contact at the point of first approach. The system is privacy-preserving, analysing behavioural signals rather than reading every message, and surfaces alerts to parents, schools or authorities while preserving evidence for law enforcement. Where current models rely on retrospective reporting by traumatised victims, Guardii delivers precision detection that stops grooming before harm occurs, addressing the underlying threat rather than counting offences after children have already been exploited.
