MORE than 300 children have been protected from harm and countless online predators have been jailed in the last year.

The Police Online Investigation Team is tasked with finding and jailing online predators who groom children and share indecent images of children on the internet.

Last year the team in Essex safeguarded 303 children, carried out 287 raids, made 133 arrests and secured 212 positive outcomes in cases.

Prosecutions included the sentencing of dangerous online predator Christopher Spooner, 43, of Pattiswick Square, Basildon.

He was jailed for eight years last February after being found with more than 14,500 indecent images of children and sharing them with people across the world.

Temporary Detective Inspector Jim Adams leads the team and says the work they do “has never been more important”.

He said: “More and more of our lives, and that of our children, is spent online – whether that be on a computer, a smart phone or a tablet.

“Sadly, that also means there are more opportunities for sexual predators to exploit. But my team of dedicated officers work hard to ensure those people are identified and not able to pose a threat to children.

“It’s not an easy job but it is incredibly important. The crime scenes we investigate are the devices we seize and the content found on them.

“It can be distressing for officers to view and categorise images, read the chat logs where children are being groomed, so looking after their welfare is another key priority for me.

“Many children suffer physical and psychological harm from the abuse they’ve suffered, and our intervention is often the first help and support they will have had.”

He also said over the course of the last year police have noticed a stark increase in the number of children that were responsible for requesting or accessing this sort of material online.

The officer added that it’s a “really concerning change in the demographic” and that children are being persuaded, tricked or threatened into sending images of themselves.

He added: “We’ve also seen significant increases in self-generated material over the last two years, which seems to coincide with the fact that people have been spending more time communicating online as a result of the pandemic.