Project Play, an NGO that has worked with 2,192 children hoping to cross the Channel from northern France to the UK to claim asylum in the last two years, has documented the impact of the hostile conditions in northern France due to regular teargassing, evictions and dinghy-slashing by the French police. During that period the NGO documented the deaths of 22 children trying to cross the Channel, including five last year.
Eleanor Lyons, the independent anti-slavery commissioner, warned that sexual exploitation of women and girls is on a clear and sustained rise in the UK, with pimps using the internet to reach new victims and advertise them online with subscription platforms then acting as a gateway to abuse.
The Molly Rose Foundation (MRF) said online networks linked to a global ecosystem labelled the Com were carrying out extreme exploitation, cyberbullying, violence and abuse and called for a coordinated global response from governments, regulators, law enforcement and tech companies. The warning follows the publication of a report by the online risk consultancy Resolver in partnership with the MRF, which was founded by the family of Molly Russell, a British teenager who killed herself in 2017 after viewing harmful content online.
The board employs more than 50 social workers to conduct the assessments, but some children have said they are out to get them. The report finds that in some cases the process has led to children's deteriorating mental health, including self-harm and suicidal ideation, and that going through a Home Office age assessment is far more severe and traumatic than a comparable experience with a local authority social worker.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) says its analysts have discovered "criminal imagery" of girls aged between 11 and 13 which "appears to have been created" using Grok. The AI tool is owned by Elon Musk's firm xAI. It can be accessed either through its website and app, or through the social media platform X. The IWF said it found "sexualised and topless imagery of girls" on a "dark web forum" in which users claimed they used Grok to create the imagery.
On Tuesday, five-year-old Liam Ramos was arriving home with his father from his preschool in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, when ICE agents detained them on their driveway. An agent then used the child to try to lure other family members from the home. Ramos and his father were subsequently transported to a facility in Texas. At the time of publishing, their lawyer believes they are in a holding facility in San Antonio.
Investigators discovered the gangs were brazenly offering to transport migrants from Calais to Dover in the back of trucks and touting it as a "taxi service". In one promotional video, three migrants are seen reclining on a mound of soft white packages inside a truck. One of the young men gives a thumbs-up to the camera. "By truck, Safe reach London UK in 2 hours," reads the caption.
Millions of files related to the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein suggest the existence of a global criminal enterprise that carried out acts meeting the legal threshold of crimes against humanity, a panel of independent experts appointed by the United Nations human rights council has said. The experts said crimes outlined in documents released by the US justice department were committed against a backdrop of supremacist beliefs, racism, corruption and extreme misogyny. The crimes, they said, showed a commodification and dehumanisation of women and girls.
