David Prescott and his co-authors, Kieran McCartan and Katarzyna Uzieblo, have posted an article to the ATSA blog titled “The challenges of child protection and safeguarding online.”

In this article, the authors discuss the difficulties anticipating evolving risks for children in today’s world.

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“Child protection and safeguarding are among the most challenging issues faced globally. The threats to children, new and old, are constantly evolving. It seems that every time we catch up and are aware of any given threat it changes and adapts. As part of his PhD, Kieran researched and examined Ulrich Beck’s idea of the risk society, which states that by the time we are aware of a risk it is often too late to change it and we instead must devote our time to risk management and damage limitation. This is very depressing from a prevention point of view; we desire to use existing knowledge to predict problematic behaviour and roll out interventions upstream to produce the harm from ever occurring. In child protection terms, this means identifying and working with at-risk populations (so at risk of committing an offence or at risk of being a victim), strengthening institution safeguarding practices, and upskilling communities about the realities of risk as well as how to intervene. Two distinct stories that highlight the challenges of child protection and safeguarding.

The first story is from the UK, where the online safety bill is being discussed, the core tenet of which is to keep children safe online from harmful material as well as risky (or more precise….”