CEOP Online Moderator's Conference

Hot on the heels of Rebecca's summary of the EU Kids Online conference comes mine of the CEOP Online Moderator's conference held in London on 16th June.

First off, these conferences always make me proud to work in this industry. Not only are we doing great work which helps to safeguard children, but we're positive, proactive and willing to share thoughts and best practice with each other - even when we're technically competitors (I mean other moderation companies rather than CEOP, of course!).

Presentations were delivered by Harm Reduction, Education, a Legal Barrister, a Covert Internet Investigator, Child Protection, Initial Assessment and Development and an Internet Investigator. These presentations helped the attendees to build a picture of just some of the work carried out by this relatively small organisation.

The day opened with a showing of the CEOP corporate video, which gives a flavour of some of the problems we're facing with regard to child abuse, and of the work done by CEOP to tackle these problems. If you haven't seen this before, it's quite an emotional roller-coaster, so be prepared - although no actual abuse is shown. Trust me, you'll never listen to this particular Oasis track the same way again.



Throughout the day, we learned more about the scale of the problem, for example:

• 1 in 6 children are a victim
• 69% of children in child abuse images are under 10 years of age
• 87% of reports coming into CEOP concern grooming
• 75% of young people have lives online unsupervised by adults
  

We learned about some of the ways children unwittingly put themselves at risk:

• "Pass the Pervert", where children share their buddy lists, eventually giving paedophiles access to a wider group of children
• "Sexting", for example a teenage girl sends a sexy picture of herself to her boyfriend, who may then send it on to trusted friends, who may then put it on a public social networking page
• Taking part in virtual world "adoptions" by adults they don't know - apparently an increasingly popular trend

We learned about some of the behaviour patterns of child abusers:

• Communicating with like-minded people on forums, essentially normalising their own behaviour
• Collecting and sharing videos or pictures innocently posted by parents of young children, for example a toddler bouncing on a bed or having his/her first wee on the toilet.
• People with a sexual interest in children often started having those feelings aged 13 or 14
• Looking for social networking pages containg sexy or flirty chat and targeting those children
• Searching for vulnerable children - victims of online bullying for example, or someone who says on their social networking sites that they have a difficult relationship with their parents, then offering help and advice - saying things like, "I'm not a perv, I just want to help. I know how you feel"

We didn't just learn about the problems, but were able to find out more about the many-pronged approach CEOP takes to keeping children safe through empowerment, education, enforcement, intelligence and protection. For example, 4,500,000 children in the UK have been reached through the ThinkUKnow programme. If you are interested in finding out more about the varied work done by CEOP, I encourage you to read their Annual Review.

Sadly, the current economic climate is putting financial pressure on CEOP. The withdrawal of some industry funding means, for example, the Intelligence Team can't operate on a 24-hour basis. Of course it could be argued that this gap should be plugged by the government - but I personally believe that industry has to take some responsibility for this too.

Discussions were held about how industry would/should deal with particular scenarios in their communities, and how in turn CEOP deals with and prioritises incoming reports. That's another post for another day, and it's something we'd welcome further discussion on.

In the meantime, however, the conference left me (and I'm sure the other attendees) feeling even more determined to ensure that we as an industry do everything humanly possible to ensure the safety of children using the internet. We need to learn everything we can about the behaviour of children and offenders, and to trust our instincts.