Madam,

I would like to warn parents their children could be at risk of being groomed by paedophiles or being bombarded with sexually explicit messages on a popular social media app.

I was briefed about the problem during a visit to the DangerPoint children’s safety centre for which I have provided funding.

One of my concerns is the free-to-use app called Musical.ly which boasts more than 150 million global so-called “musers”, 2.5 million of them in the UK.

The app allows those who sign up to create lip sync videos and post the footage online.

Viewers can post real-time comments and can even be “guested” into live chats.

Safety experts at DangerPoint are worried it is easy for under-age children to join by saying they are 13 years old or over.

Visiting children and young people encounter a range of different scenarios involving dangerous or difficult situations.

Among them are a dark alley, a bus, a train carriage, a beach, a building site, a shop, a farm yard and one of the most dangerous places of all – the home.

There are interactive films and even a driving simulator that’s up to the standard of the best computer games in terms of software and graphics.

The work done by DangerPoint is invaluable because it allows schools and other organisations to bring children here to learn, not just about internet safety, but safety in the home, outside, and all sorts of personal safety.

If it saves only a few children from being harmed in whatever way then I think it has been efficient and effective way of getting the message across.

There is nothing more important than keeping children safe and I’m happy to be able to fund schools to come here.

We’re seeing that children at a very young age do use social media and that is a worry and I think we need to do what we can to get the message through to parents and grandparents that they need to be aware of what their children of whatever age are doing online.

I think the lesson is, when you buy a tablet or a smartphone for your child, not only do you need to put the security settings on the phone itself, but you also need to put them on all of the apps that they use as well, and to make sure that they don’t join social media until they are 13 years of age.

Yours etc,

Arfon Jones, North Wales Police and Crime Commissioner.

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