With every court case that passes, with every erstwhile celebrity arrested, and in the wake of the small tsunami of historical complaints of sex abuse triggered by the Jimmy Savile scandal, we could be forgiven for wondering if the world is populated by ageing paedophiles targeting young, mostly female, victims.

In fact, most of the speakers at last week's annual conference of the Scottish Association for the Study of Offending flagged up a rather different set of concerns. While the Scottish police, judiciary and academia continue to pursue ever more sophisticated means of identifying paedophile rings operated by adult men, the prevalent fear now is the increase in inappropriate peer-to-peer use of social media.

Most ubiquitous is the use of smartphones for "sexting"; youngsters often as young as 10 being persuaded to take intimate photographs of themselves and text them to a "boyfriend". The problems inherent in this were graphically flagged up in an Australian police video now used by Police Scotland.

It opens with an adolescent schoolgirl exiting the loo buttoning her blouse, while holding her phone with which she has obviously taken a snap of her breasts.

As she goes into the class we see the boy who had requested the text check out the image on his phone, then send it to their classmates. In the space of a few seconds what she thought was a private exchange had become public property.

She is far from imaginary; one study of sexting in schools found that 28% admitted to texting a naked image of themselves.

As Detective Superintendent Stevie Wilson pointed out, this is a growing problem with a generation whose lives are governed by the internet, and who are vulnerable to variations of cyber-bullying few of their parents can begin to imagine.

The penalty isn't always confined to embarrassment. He talked about incidents of child suicide and self-harming directly linked to cyber-bullying when an innocent mistake, a momentary lapse of judgment, left a young person devastated by subsequent tormenting.

Clinical psychologist Ethel Quayle from Edinburgh University has been studying all of this in an international context and provided a raft of statistics from America, Finland and Ireland, all suggesting traditional forms of grooming and sex abuse were declining, in some cases quite sharply, but there had been corresponding rises in online activities, sexting and peer-to-peer abuse.

She flagged up a study last year which found that more than half of those arrested for grooming children online were aged under 25.

And, as is inevitable with relatively new forms of crime, the statistics probably haven't yet caught up with the incidence.

Or, indeed, with the ingenuity of the internet-savvy generation for whom social media is the centrepiece of many of their relationships. The common misuse of digital toys includes mini videos of what couples at parties fondly imagined to be a private sexual encounter, until well refreshed "friends" burst in and capture the scene for posterity – not to mention the amusement of hundreds of Facebook contacts.

One company has marketed a new App, snapchat, the principal selling point seems to be that it allows you to share photographs with a life expectancy of just a few seconds before they disappear into the ether. So a shared moment, indiscreet or innocent will be just that.

In the midst of all of this, the adult offenders, both within families and those given easy access to underage victims through legitimate leisure activities, have not gone away. But here too the internet age has brought in its wake a different kind of grooming.

The groups of men recently tried and convicted in the middle and north of England used gifts and bribes, alcohol and drugs to entice usually vulnerable youngsters.

More current now, according to Wilson, Quayle and, in her presentation, senior advocate depute Alison di Rollo, is a pernicious form of online grooming.

Here the perpetrator will go online with a false identity, pretending perhaps to be a personable teenager, rather than an ageing pervert.

Very swiftly they will advance the online friendship to a stage where the young girl might be persuaded to perform sexual activities which are filmed on a webcam.

She is then blackmailed into more explicit behaviour by the threat of the films being made public or shown to her parents.

One man prosecuted by Ms di Rollo had targeted 49 children this way and had a sophisticated network of computers and webcams on which he stored thousands of indecent images.

This kind of internet illegality poses huge difficulties not just with police and prosecuting authorities trying to stay ahead of the criminal misuse of technology, but with parents trying to find an acceptable balance between their child's growing need for independence and their own duty of care.

The ownership of mobile phones among even very young children has grown exponentially, and here, in the one device, is a means of keeping your child safe when he or she is out and about, yet also a means of harming them if they are persuaded into using them for quite different purposes.

The use of computers and social media is no longer a phenomenon but a way of life, and few are the households where the offsprings' expertise is not vastly more advanced than that of the parents.

Never has there been a greater need for trust and honesty between parents and children, not least to protect the latter from the activities of people who are strangers to both commodities.