Why We Need to Speak with One Voice on Children’s Online Safety
Parents across the world are calling for clearer, stronger action to keep children safe online.
Published: Mon 14 Aug 2017
Again and again, we talk to companies who are in denial. They think their services are safe from child sexual abuse imagery, or they have looked at the risk and decided it’s a case of “low risk x medium impact = let’s not think about that right now”.
Increasing numbers of employees and a growing customer base adds up to a growth in the business, but it also means there’s a greater likelihood that someone could view or share child sexual abuse imagery at work.
Yet, few business Internet Service Providers (ISPs) want to face the fact that their customers or staff could cause them huge reputational damage. IWF Member Netclean revealed in their 2016 report: “1 in 1,000 employees looks at child sexual abuse images or videos on work’s time, using work equipment.”
As an employer, why don’t you want to ensure that can’t happen? As a business ISP, what’s stopping you from offering protection to your customers?
The IWF URL List is a unique list of specific webpages showing images and/or videos of children being sexually abused. It allows companies to block and filter access to these pages while we work with international partners behind the scenes to remove the imagery.
People who seek out child sexual abuse imagery are known to collect and catalogue these images. Some spend much longer on this activity than they have free time in the day, thus it spills over into work time.
Big and small ISPs are run by people. Out of the suits these people are mums, dads, aunties, and uncles. Let’s not talk as companies, let’s talk as people. As people who care enough to stop the spread of child sexual abuse images, and as people who take the responsibility to protect not only the children who have suffered abuse from repeat victimisation, but also their staff and customers.
For more information about the IWF URL List contact me today ([email protected]) or visit iwf.org.uk/url-list
Parents across the world are calling for clearer, stronger action to keep children safe online.
The debate on the EU’s proposed Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR) has been dominated by one loud slogan. A slogan which may have dire consequences for the safety and wellbeing of millions of children worldwide.
Three years ago, when Pinsent Masons set out to unite their communities to raise money for the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), no one could have predicted how far their idea would go or how many people would still be moving for the cause three years later.