• Nearly 40 suspected online paedophiles have been arrested and 138 children protected during a week-long operation by the Met in London.
• Laptops and phones and tens of thousands of images of child abuse and sexual exploitation were also seized.
• The arrests come amid warnings from Scotland Yard that the lockdown had increased the risk of sexual predators online attempting to groom children and young people. 
• Detective Superintendent Helen Flanagan, from the Met’s Online Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation Unit, said that the suspects came “from a variety of backgrounds”.

• Instagram users can now start a Facebook ‘Room’ from the direct messaging feature of the app. 
• Starting a Room on Instagram will still bring the user to Messenger.
• Facebook Messenger Rooms was launched earlier this month. For more information on staying safe on this platform, check out our video.

• Facebook Shareholders are voting this week on a proposal to cease the firm’s plans for end to end encryption for all messages. 
• In 2019 tech companies reported around 70 million instances of child sexual exploitation material to authorities – almost 85% of those came from Facebook. 
• Michael Passoff, founder of Proxy Impact, a shareholder advocacy service against the use of encryption warned that if encryption plans go ahead, 70% of cases could become invisible. 
• The vote is likely to fail as Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg controls the majority of shares.

• Childline has reported that young people are having a counselling session every five minutes on average throughout the lockdown. Childline has dealt with 16,644 counselling sessions from March 23 to May 10. 
• Dame Esther Rantzen, the founder of Childline, said: “We know from the counselling sessions we have delivered that children’s mental health has been directly impacted and those children who are living in homes which are not safe – where there is violence, addiction or abuse – are finding it especially difficult during lockdown.”

• Refuge, the charity which runs the national domestic abuse helpline has reported a ten-fold increase in visits to their site in the last two weeks. 
• The charity said the lockdown itself does not cause domestic abuse but “can aggravate pre-existing behaviours in an abusive partner”.
• Refuge said that over the past three weeks it recorded a 66% increase in calls to its helpline and recorded a 957% increase in web traffic over the past two weeks.

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