Child Sexual Abuse Material Online (Part 1) *edit- Includes the recent news update about Age ID Plan

Cyber Synapse Podcast

The title alone may be enough to evoke a feeling of discomfort in you. Some of you may be here because you are curious and some for reasons other than that. This in an information based interview and therefore contains conversations that relate to the title.

If you haven't listened to the introduction to Season 3 -Please do so as I explain the format of the first two episodes of this season and the caveat around being cybertraumatisied.

I begin this episode with John Carr,: A Child Online Safety Consultant. We discuss the prevalence of child sexual abuse material online (CSAM) and why as a society we need to be taking as much action as we can to reduce this, educate our parents, professionals and support organisations that deal with this everyday, such as the IWF and INHOPE (Coming next episode!)

John takes us through some of his recent blogs (which he does regularly and with passion). We discuss how this material ends up online, how grooming is also related and the online white harms paper and how this can help us understand the duties of care that social media companies can take to assist in reporting and remove much of this material. This is a conversation that can lay dormant and out of our comfort zones no more. John is complimentary about the actions we re taking in the UK in terms of the online harms white paper and age identification plan and how these will assist us in reducing some of these issues/threats and concerns. We didn't get round to talking about Domain Name over HTTPS so please head to Johns blog to see why this is one of a/(my) major worries!

Johns blog can be found : https://johncarr.blog/2019/

And he is on LinkedIn and Twitter

EDIT 17 OCT 2019

It was reported in the media on the 18th October 2019 that the Online Identification plan will be scrapped- as you would expect this caused uproar however this is what actually appears in the statement released by Parliament:

"The government has concluded that this objective of coherence will be best achieved through our wider online harms proposals and, as a consequence, will not be commencing Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017 concerning age verification for online pornography. The Digital Economy Act objectives will therefore be delivered through our proposed online harms regulatory regime. This course of action will give the regulator discretion on the most effective means for companies to meet their duty of care. As currently drafted, the Digital Economy Act does not cover social media platforms. " taken from https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-statements/commons/

This means that there is still much work to be done here and in the meantime the discussion that John and I have about social media, grooming, adult content and yet to be discussed in depth DOH still remain.

Children and Young people will continue to be at risk of seeing this material online and if you would like to know as a parent what to do- head to my youtube channel for the Parents guide to Porn (short video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzXa-giQV0o&t=1s