Safe on Social

Teaching is the only profession that requires you to front up in front of your abuser the very next morning, mark their work fairly, and keep them safe. If you know, you know. It is the morning after. You are in the driver's seat with the keys in your hand, and you have not started the car. You are not crying, not yet. You are running the words back, the ones a fifteen-year-old said in front of twenty-eight other children, and then the rest of it, the post that went up after

If you have a young gamer in your house, you will know the occasional laughter and murmur of a conversation happening through a headset from the next room. You think to yourself, good, they’re happy, they’re safe, they’re only playing a game. When it comes to Roblox, it has not been only a game for quite some time now. It is a social recreation platform that looks more like a massive online shopping centre than a game. In fact, when I have spoken about it in public, I often u

Most of us have not slowed down. We have scrolled past it a hundred times and filed it under silly. If you have been anywhere near TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts in the last six months, you have seen them. AI-generated soap operas starring fruit people. A strawberry cheats on her husband with a banana. A jealous watermelon confronts a "gold digger" cherry. A garlic leaves his wife for giving birth to another mango. A pineapple child throws their strawberry sibling

For years people have said that if we just had more self-control, were better parents, and set clearer boundaries, everything would be okay. They told us to be stricter, but also more relaxed, and to find a balance between the two. This way of thinking puts all the blame on the parents. It’s always been yy assumption that big tech companies are trying to shift the responsibility away from themselves and onto parents. They want us to feel guilty for not being good enough paren

This week the IWF released new figures on child self-reported deepfake abuse. This is what to do if you child or student says an image isn’t real. The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) and Childline released their latest Report Remove figures for the past six months last week. It is a service in the UK that lets under eighteens flag sexual images or videos of themselves and get them taken down. The sobering numbers that have been reported are that 420 of those reports are dee