Crime and Policing Act 2026: Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse recommendations factsheet

The United Kingdom Crime and Policing Act 2026 introduces a new statutory aggravating factor for grooming in the sentencing of child sexual offences, meaning that offending facilitated by or involving the grooming of a person under 18 will attract more substantial penalties. The measure captures models of exploitation not currently directly addressed by existing culpability factors in the Sentencing Guidelines, including where an offender assaults a victim who has been groomed by another member of a grooming network or where a person under 18 has been groomed to recruit others who are then sexually assaulted. The legislation applies to rape, sexual assault and other child sex offences, and specifies that courts may treat grooming as an aggravating factor for other offences where appropriate. The Act also introduces a new duty on teachers, healthcare workers and others to report reported or suspected child sexual abuse to police or local authorities, and amends the Limitation Act 1980 to lift the limitation period on personal injury claims arising from sexual abuse of a child.

Grooming operates as a sustained pattern of trust-building, boundary-testing and isolation that unfolds over days or weeks in private conversation, often invisible to retrospective keyword filtering or one-time registration checks. The world-leading AI online-safety platform developed by Guardii detects that conversational arc as it develops, identifying coercion, escalation and age-inappropriate contact in real time across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other platforms. By flagging the shape and seriousness of a conversation rather than handing anyone a feed of what was said, the anti-grooming detection module surfaces a child at risk to a parent, school or professional the moment the harm pattern emerges, enabling rapid escalation to the right authority and blocking hostile contact before the offender succeeds, not after the damage is done.