'It's a massive problem. You need to educate the children, but you also need to educate the parents'

Snapchat, TikTok, Minecraft, Roblox, Discord - they're just a few of the apps you might find on the home screen of your child's phone or tablet.

The platforms are innocuous enough at first glance; a way to chat with friends, watch silly videos, lose themselves in a digital world. But when doors are closed and headphones in, how much do you really know about what your child is doing online?

Every single one of these apps can pose a threat from sexual predators - that's according to Greater Manchester Police. Their Online Child Abuse Investigation Team (OCAIT) say parents are often great at protecting their children from in-person 'contact' offences, but can turn a blind eye to what they are doing online, potentially leaving the door wide open to the most perverse offenders.

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Sometimes the threat comes from the access apps can give predators to children. But increasingly, the team are seeing children as young as seven inadvertently taking and uploading indecent images and videos of themselves to platforms such as Snapchat and TikTok, with no involvement from any third parties.

"It is massive," Detective Inspector Zoe Marsden, who heads up the OCAIT unit, said. "Going forward, I think we need to be linking with places of education, to try and get in there early and educate children on the risks.

"In terms of parental awareness, I think parents are very, very good at protecting their children from contact offences," she added. "Things like you don't go out at night, you have your phone, you let me know what time you're going to be in. All of that is brilliant.

"But I think parents don't always apply the same to their children's online safety. And