Online Harm Isn't a Separate Safeguarding Issue- It's Where Childhood Happens
This week, the Youth Justice Board published a new Evidence and Insights Pack on Online Harms Affecting Children, bringing together research on the ways digital environments are influencing children's safety, wellbeing and vulnerability.
Whilst the report is aimed at supporting youth justice professionals, its messages are relevant to anyone working with children because the reality is simple.
Children don't separate their online lives from their offline lives and as safeguarding professionals, neither should we.
Key findings of the report
The evidence pack highlights the significant role that online platforms now play in children's everyday lives. Whilst they offer opportunities for learning, connection and creativity, they also expose children to a range of complex and often interconnected safeguarding risks.
The report found that:
Children are vulnerable to a variety of online harms, including cyberbullying, child sexual abuse, exploitation, radicalisation and coercive behaviour.
Exposure to harmful online content, together with the non-consensual sharing of intimate images, is becoming increasingly common, with girls disproportionately affected.
Many children involved in harmful online behaviours have experienced trauma, abuse or other complex vulnerabilities themselves, reinforcing the importance of adopting a trauma-informed approach rather than making assumptions.
Weaknesses in platform design, alongside limited digital knowledge and confidence among many adults, can increase children's exposure to harm and make effective safeguarding more challenging.
The impact of online harm can be long-lasting, affecting children's emotional wellbeing, relationships and, in some cases, contributing to involvement in violence or offending in the offline world.
What does effective safeguarding look like?
Whilst the report acknowledges that further UK-specific research is needed, it identifies several approaches that show promise in reducing online harm and improving outcomes for children.
These include:
Designing digital platforms with children's safety at the forefront, including age-appropriate settings and protective features by default.
Providing early intervention and proportionate responses that reduce harm without unnecessarily criminalising children, recognising what the evidence tells us about preventing future offending.
Improving digital literacy for children, parents, carers and professionals so that everyone has the confidence to recognise online risks and respond appropriately.
Delivering education around healthy relationships and gender-sensitive approaches that help children understand consent, respect and positive behaviours both online and offline.
Using strength-based, trauma-informed interventions that promote belonging, resilience, critical thinking and positive identity, helping children build protective factors that reduce vulnerability to exploitation and abuse.
The online world is the real world
For today's children and young people, friendships begin online, relationships develop online, gaming happens online, learning happens online and unfortunately, abuse, exploitation, bullying and grooming happen online too. The digital world is no longer somewhere children visit.
It is where many of them grow up and that means safeguarding can no longer focus solely on physical environments such as schools, homes, sports clubs or community settings. Our safeguarding approach must be just as confident in digital spaces.
Harm is becoming increasingly complex
When people hear "online harm", they often think about social media.
But the reality is much broader.
Children may experience:
Online grooming
Child criminal exploitation
Child sexual exploitation
Cyberbullying
Exposure to harmful or violent content
Online coercion and blackmail
Radicalisation
Financial exploitation
Misogynistic or extremist content
Pressure to share indecent images
AI-generated abuse and manipulation
Many of these harms do not stay online and they quickly become real-world safeguarding concerns affecting mental health, education, relationships and physical safety.
We need to stop asking "Was it online or offline?"
One of the biggest shifts I believe safeguarding professionals need to make is moving away from seeing online harm as a separate category.
Instead, we should ask:
How did technology contribute to the harm?
Technology is often simply the method.
The safeguarding concern remains the same whether a child is groomed in a park or through a gaming platform, whether coercion happens face-to-face or through encrypted messaging, whether bullying takes place in a classroom or a group chat, because the impact on the child can be equally significant.
Professional curiosity matters more than ever
As technology evolves, safeguarding professionals must continue asking better questions.
What apps are children using?
Who are they communicating with?
What online communities are influencing them?
Could technology be playing a role in the behaviours or concerns we're seeing?
Professional curiosity has never been more important. Children may not always recognise that what they are experiencing online is abuse and that places an even greater responsibility on adults to understand digital risks and remain curious.
Digital resilience is safeguarding
Whilst organisations work hard to respond to online harm, we also need to focus on prevention.
Building digital resilience should become part of everyday safeguarding practice.
That means helping children to:
Recognise manipulation and coercion
Understand healthy online relationships
Identify misinformation
Know how and where to seek help
Report concerns confidently
Develop critical thinking skills
Build safe digital habits
Safeguarding isn't about teaching children to fear technology, it's about helping them navigate it safely.
What should organisations be doing?
Every organisation working with children should take this opportunity to reflect.
Ask yourself:
Are staff confident recognising online safeguarding concerns?
Does your safeguarding training reflect current digital risks?
Do your policies include emerging technologies such as AI?
Are parents and carers receiving guidance as well as children?
Do leaders understand the rapidly changing digital landscape?
Technology moves quickly so our safeguarding practice must keep pace.
Looking beyond compliance
The Youth Justice Board's evidence pack is another reminder that online harm is no longer an emerging issue, it is already shaping children's lives every single day. As safeguarding professionals, our role is not to become technology experts, it is to remain curious, to keep learning, to understand how children's lives are changing and to ensure our safeguarding systems evolve alongside them.
Because children don't switch safeguarding on and off when they log in.
Neither should we.