In-game chats are a gift to child predators. Why is online gaming escaping scrutiny?

And I saw exactly where it starts.

So when the Prime Minister finally announced plans to raise the age limit for harmful social media to 16, I applauded him. It is a bold move, and one that is vital to keeping our children safe. But there is one glaring omission in this policy that should alarm us all: the gaming industry.

Gaming platforms are one of the main places offenders go to find children, and they do it at an enormous scale. Not every approach goes anywhere, but once an offender has a child's attention, they set about building trust, posing as another child, offering gifts such as in-game currency, before moving the child onto private, encrypted apps where the grooming continues, sometimes for hours, sometimes for months. Some of the worst cases of exploitation I have seen in my time working on this issue began exactly this way.

I have spoken to survivors who were blackmailed and coerced into harming themselves and others by people they met online. I am aware of children who were driven to suicide by people they met playing what their parents believed was a harmless game. What began as an innocent bit of virtual football with players around the world ended in something far worse.

And it is not only the games themselves. Other platforms come with vast chat functions of their own, which means offenders can build these relationships well beyond the game.

The industry knows this. Its response, according to reports, has not been to enforce the protocols that would make its platforms safe, but to launch an almighty lobbying effort insisting that pairing children with strangers is vital to the gaming experience and cannot be touched. This is a commercial argument dressed up as a technical one. No parent would accept a school that let unknown adults wander the playground at will, yet that is precisely the arrangement these platforms defend.

Allowing unvetted strangers direct contact with children is the equivalent of opening the school gates for anyone to enter who wishes to harm our children, and the industry is asking ministers to keep them open.

That is before we come to addiction. These products are engineered to keep children playing, spending and returning, using the same compulsive design techniques the social media legislation is intended to address. A platform that hooks a child and then exposes them to strangers has failed twice over.

The platforms are not the predators. But they have built the systems that make predation easy and profitable, and they have resisted every attempt to change them. To leave gaming platforms - and the sites built to keep children hooked - out of the conversation about under-16s would be a grave mistake.

I have spent the last decade listening to the children who lived with the consequences; ministers should now listen to the people who see these harms every single day. Our children's safety is not up for negotiation.

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Simon Bailey is Chairman of the International Policing and Public Protection Research Institute (IPPPRI).

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