Scottish police hunt online 'Com' gangs coercing girls into self-harm

Police Scotland has joined international law enforcement targeting online networks that groom and blackmail children into self-harm. The groups primarily target girls aged 11–17 on gaming and social media platforms.

Police Scotland joins global crackdown on 'Com' networks targeting girls online

Detectives in Scotland are actively hunting members of loose online networks known as "The Com" — sadistic groups that groom and coerce children, mostly girls, into acts of self-harm, BBC News reports.

The networks, predominantly made up of teenage and young adult males, have grown in prominence in recent years following cases involving sextortion, hacking, and self-harm encouragement. Victims are typically girls aged between 11 and 17, targeted on gaming platforms and social media before being moved into more private online spaces.

So far, one arrest has been made in Scotland. A handful of convictions have been secured in England, including that of 20-year-old Justin Swaddle, who was jailed for two years in August after blackmailing and coercing more than 100 victims into acts of self-harm — among them carving his online username into their bodies.

Nearly a thousand images in a single case

A detective constable, identified only as Paul, works in Police Scotland's internet investigations unit at the force's Scottish Crime Campus. He described to BBC News the scale of material his team must process.

"Unfortunately, we are getting a lot of self-harm imagery," Paul said. "There's nearly a thousand images in this particular case, and we need to go through every single one of those."

The images — flagged by the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the United States and passed via the National Crime Agency (NCA) to Police Scotland — include photographs of a young girl's arm covered in blood, and blood used to daub symbols on a bathroom wall. Occult and Satanic sigils appear frequently in such material, Paul said, used by abusers seeking to appear "as extreme as possible".

"It's about how much control you can get, up to the point that they're getting them to self-harm," he said.

How the grooming works

Hazel Stewart, of the NCA's Threat Leadership team, described the prevalence of Com groups as "low-volume, high-harm". She told BBC News that perpetrators are often young males who have been socially isolated or bullied and seek identity online.

"They find their own identity online, they can be whoever they want to be," Stewart said. "And therefore they are encouraging those that are vulnerable, usually young females... seeking them out, say, on suicidal ideation sites or eating disorder sites, and encourage them into more private spaces."

Stewart explained that abusers initially form supportive relationships with victims before escalating demands. "It might be a small cut at first. Or it might be harm to a pet, or a sibling," she said. "That harm will escalate and the grooming and manipulation continues, and the victim is in a situation where they can't escape."

The abuse is often carried out for "kudos" — social clout among peers within the group.

Scotland mapping the threat

Det Ch Insp Craig Faulds, who leads Police Scotland's efforts targeting the groups' links to Scotland, described the crimes as "an evolution of online child abuse and sexual exploitation".

"We are seeing cases where perpetrators online are targeting young vulnerable people, usually girls, and they are manipulating them, they are coercing them into sharing indecent images of themselves," Faulds told BBC News. "Some of the more serious cases are seen by coercing individuals to cause acts of serious self-harm."

Faulds confirmed that both victims and perpetrators had been identified in Scotland, adding that officers were "at the stage of mapping this threat to understand significance and the prevalence of it". He noted that abuse typically begins on "innocuous gaming platforms" before migrating to social media, messaging services and online forums.

International response

The NCA said in May that it was investigating around 200 cases involving these networks. Stewart described the threat as a "global problem", with the UK co-ordinating with law enforcement agencies in the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, as well as Interpol and Europol.

Com groups involved in recent court cases include "The 764" and "CVLT", though membership and group dynamics shift frequently. The Com — short for "the community" — are loosely affiliated online networks involved in abuse, financial crimes and extremism.

The Molly Rose Foundation, a suicide prevention charity supporting young people and families affected by the networks, said the groups "represent the gravest risk to children online".

Source: BBC News