Child online safety is a collective effort, let’s start acting like it

The concept, “it takes a village to raise a child” has been used time and time again to highlight how an entire community, extended family, neighbours, friends and teachers, all have a role to play in the safe and healthy upbringing of children.

Today, the safety of our children isn’t confined to the streets. Instead, threats are increasingly taking place online. It is a difficult landscape to monitor, and the online community must think like a village, coming together to advance child online protection.

It’s a topic no-one wants to talk about, but ignoring such a major issue in Australia won’t make it disappear. In the 2024-25 financial year, the ACCCE Child Protection Triage Unit received 82,764 reports of online child sexual exploitation. This equates to an average of 226 reports per day or 6897 reports a month.

This is a 41 per cent jump in online child sexual exploitation reports, indicating that the issue is, unfortunately, getting worse. With the growing number of online platforms, this abusive content has had an increasing number of avenues to reach wider audiences, and that needs to stop.

While the Australian Federal Police (AFP) has committed to a major crackdown on online sexual abuse, they’re up against a steady stream of new websites continually making their way online. In a recent statement, the AFP outlined that it is not a task they can tackle alone. In fact, the growth only underscores the need for a whole-of-community approach.

We need to shift the narrative. For years, the onus of safety online has been put on parents, educators, law enforcement and even children. Monitoring children online has become part of the never-ending list of parental duties, right next to homework and football practice.

While caregivers have become increasingly stressed about what their children could be exposed to online, the digital organisations perpetuating access to these sites have sat in the background, passively watching it all go by. This needs to come to an end.

The Internet Watch Foundation, which is dedicated to eliminating child sexual abuse imagery online, has identified a list of dedicated child sexual abuse domains and encouraged network operators, VPN providers, and more to block these websites.

It’s vital organisations with a unique ability and responsibility to block access to these websites heed this, enforcing network-level protections against child online abuse sites listed by the IWF. It’s as simple as blocking these websites at the domain name system (DNS) layer. No monitoring, no traffic inspection, just plain blocking the bad guys.

The broader tech industry needs to create network-wide protections to prevent access to child sexual abuse domains. This should be a collective response, with tech leaders working alongside each other, listening to child privacy experts to adopt safeguards and standard privacy-preserving infrastructure.

The idea is to enable network operators to restrict access to verified criminal domains safely and transparently. Privacy first infrastructure should be the norm, not the exception.

These steps can also be taken by other industries. The finance sector should partner with authorities to disrupt activities and accounts funnelling money to criminal networks who benefit from this kind of content for example.

Even advertisers have a part to play by refusing to place ads on platforms that fail to adequately moderate harmful content.

Working in isolation, each of these measures won’t stop child sexual exploitation online. But if these sectors can work together alongside law enforcement, caregivers, education and healthcare, we can make a significant difference.

Canberra also has a part to play here. While the capital is taking a lead in adopting social media and internet safeguards through age verification, more industries need to join the effort for holistic security. By setting a national standard, Australia and the world can collectively stamp out access to the darkest corners of the internet and protect our most vulnerable. 

While some may argue the idea of the village is declining in the digital age, the reality is the opposite – it is only getting more important. Where interactions can be shielded from public view, it takes more awareness, communication and action to stop nefarious behaviour. We all have a moral responsibility here.

Whether industry, public sector, law enforcement or caregiver, we can all be a part of the village and do our part to protect our young people.

Author: Pete Membrey.