I WAS on a bus recently, trying to zone out of the irritating chatter of a couple of schoolgirls sitting nearby.

“He thought he was talking to a girl but it was some man who was, like, 40 or something!” one of them shrieked. “He was well upset. Proper crying, like a baby.” The pair collapsed into giggles, quickly moving on to the next snippet of playground tittle-tattle.

I realised, half-listening, that what they had briefly and casually mentioned was online abuse. A young teenager chatting online with what he believed was a girl of his age, who turned out to be a male adult.

It’s the kind of thing you see in NSPCC campaign videos or a soap storyline - troubled teen Max in Coronation Street recently fell for a girl online, only to discover it was a hoax - and although we know it goes on, we don’t think much about it. But the chatter of those girls on the bus brought it home that online abuse is happening all the time. It could be happening to a child on your street right now.

For children and young people born in this century, digital skills come as naturally as reading and writing. The internet is a powerful tool for education and communication. It’s also a sinister place where children are easy prey, and can access content that they are not equipped to process.

So what’s being done about it? When it comes to online legislation, the safety of children should be a priority, right?

Yet the Online Safety Bill, requiring online platforms to find and take down illegal content to protect users, in particular children, has been delayed again and again.

“It’s too late for us,” Ian Russell said, in a TV interview this week. In 2017 his daughter, Molly Russell, took her own life, aged 14, after suffering depression linked to online content. After her death, in 2017, a stream of graphic content about suicide and self harm was found on her social media accounts.

Ian Russell wants the Government to act quickly on the online legislation or, as he says, the tragedies of self harm and suicide among young people will continue.

The NSPCC predicts that more than 100 online sexual abuse crimes will be recorded against children every day before the Bill goes through. This month the charity handed a petition to the Prime Minister calling on him to ensure it is passed sooner rather than later.

In the four years since the Bill was proposed, online offences have continued to rise. Over the months since it was last delayed, Home Office data suggests an estimated 13,000 online child sex offences recorded by police across England and Wales. In that time, says the NSPCC, there has been a 35per cent rise in Childline counselling sessions relating to online grooming.

Social media is awash with dangerous content that children are seeing every day - graphic images glamorising violence and porn, along with grooming risks and horrific abuse. Children as young as seven are being coerced by abusers into filming themselves carrying out the most severe forms of child sexual abuse material, warns the Internet Watch Foundation. The child protection charity found nearly 900 instances of Category A child sexual abuse material in just five days.

IWF chief executive Susie Hargreaves says predators are “gaining unprecedented access to children in places where we think they should be safe and protected”.

The Government says it will bring the Online Safety Bill back to the Commons as soon as possible. When, though? This is an opportunity to change the way online platforms are regulated, to make them safer, and it has been allowed to drift for far too long. It’s a fine balance to tighten online safety while maintaining freedom of speech, but there is a duty of care to protect children from online dangers.

Digital technology has advanced at a bewildering speed, with disturbing and deadly consequences, and the law just isn’t keeping up.