This article describes online abuse of children, including coerced self-harm.
Detectives in Scotland have joined international law enforcement in targeting online groups that groom and coerce children into acts of self-harm. Officers are pursuing members of loose networks known as “The Com”, which mainly target girls on gaming platforms and social media.
The groups are mostly made up of teenage and young adult males. They have risen in prominence in recent years through cases involving sextortion and hacking as well as self-harm encouragement. There has been one arrest in Scotland so far, and a handful of convictions in England. The Molly Rose Foundation, a suicide prevention charity working with affected young people and families, says the groups “represent the gravest risk to children online”.
What the work actually looks like
A detective constable in Police Scotland’s internet investigations unit, identified only as Paul, showed the BBC material sent to the team by the National Crime Agency. It had been flagged by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the United States before reaching Scotland.
“Unfortunately, we are getting a lot of self-harm imagery,” he said. “There’s nearly a thousand images in this particular case, and we need to go through every single one of those.” The job is to identify both the victim and the Scottish perpetrator. In the case he described, a girl is alleged to have been directed to harm herself by someone she met online, understood to be a young male in Scotland.
The motive is the part parents miss
The money motive that defines ordinary sextortion is often absent here. Police say the coercion is frequently done for “kudos” — status and clout among peers in the group. That changes the shape of the danger in a way worth understanding, because the advice that works against a scammer does not work against this.
A financial blackmailer wants to be paid and will go away when paying becomes impossible. Someone collecting proof of control for an audience has no exit condition at all: compliance produces a demand for more, and there is nothing to settle.
What this means for a household in Bangladesh
Nothing about these networks is geographically limited. They operate on the platforms teenagers here already use — the same gaming voice chats, the same direct messages — and they select by vulnerability rather than by country.
Two things are worth doing, and neither is a software setting. The first is to make it survivable to confess: a child who believes an image will cost them their family will comply with anything rather than tell. The sentence that prevents the worst outcome is some version of if this ever happens, come to me and I will not be angry.
The second is to know that an image already sent is not the end of the matter. Platforms are required to remove intimate images on report, services like Take It Down and StopNCII can block known images from being re-uploaded, and in Bangladesh the police Cyber Support for Women unit and the national 999 line both take these reports. Paying, or complying, is the one response that reliably makes it worse.
