Safer Internet Day: Five tools parents and teachers can use to protect children

By Dawn Jotham, safeguarding and pastoral lead at Tes.

In 2023/24, Childline provided over 900 counselling sessions to children on online sexual coercion and extortion, while the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) reported a disturbing rise in younger children being targeted.

Issues with sextortion can go hand in hand with synthetic sexual content also known as deepfakes. Deepfakes involve the use of technology to digitally alter and replace a person’s face or voice with another’s on an image or video. Deepfakes can be used to demean, defraud, and disinform.

As part of Safer Internet Day 2025, Tes’ safeguarding expert Dawn Jotham has shared some of the best tools to use when dealing with these threats:

• Report remove: The Internet Watch Foundation and Childline’s online tool that helps report and remove harmful images.
• Take it down: The National Centerfor Missing and Exploited Children has a tool that assists in stopping the online sharing of images across participating platforms.
• Reporting harmful content: Use official reporting channels to flag harmful material.
• Revenge porn helpline: There are support helplines that help those affected by intimate images being shared without consent.
• Direct reporting: Encourage reporting incidents directly to the platform or app where the content is shared.

Sextortion and deepfakes are a growing issue that has devastating impacts on children and these challenges must be met with greater awareness.

To find out more about what Tes is doing for Safer Internet Day 2025, please visit here.