A UK children’s charity called NSPCC is urging Facebook release all of its internal records on child abuse incidents after discovering that UK police recorded more than 5,000 child grooming crimes on Facebook-owned platforms since 2017. According to the charity, 53 percent of all grooming crimes occur on Facebook’s apps, including WhatsApp and Instagram. This breaks down to an astonishing 24 crimes per week.

Of course, many if not most of these crimes go unreported, leading NSCC to conclude that this report is just the “tip of the iceberg.” The charity also accused Facebook of aiming for easy PR wins instead of doing the actual hard work of transparency.

“Instead of scribbling defensive blogs and setting their PR machine on journalists, Nick Clegg and Mark Zuckerberg must now publish all their research into how their platforms contribute to harm and sexual abuse and step up their efforts to fix their sites so they are safe for children,” NSPCC executive Peter Wanless said in a statement.

This potential scandal couldn’t have come at a worse time for Facebook, which is currently mired in countless other controversies. However, this is obviously an extremely important issue, and it’s good that dedicated advocates like the NSPCC aren’t allowing it to fall through the cracks.

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