Our response highlights the need to move beyond debates focused primarily on age restrictions and access to social media, and instead address the underlying conditions that allow and facilitate harm to occur online.
The Centre for Protecting Women Online (CPWO) has submitted evidence to the Department for Science Innovation and Technology’s Growing up in the online world consultation, which is exploring how to improve children’s experiences and safety online.
We welcome the Government’s commitment to addressing online harms and creating safer digital environments for children and young people. However, our response highlights the need to move beyond debates focused primarily on age restrictions and access to social media, and instead address the underlying conditions that allow and facilitate harm to occur online.
Too often, discussions about online safety focus on how children can better manage risks for themselves. While education, digital literacy and parental support all have an important role to play, children should not be expected to carry the burden of navigating online environments that have not been designed with their safety in mind. Prevention must come first. This means ensuring that platforms identify and address foreseeable risks before products and features are introduced or products are deployed, rather than responding only after harm has occurred.
Our submission also stresses the importance of recognising that children’s online experiences are not gender-neutral. Girls face particular risks online, including sexual harassment, image-based abuse, grooming, sexual exploitation and misogynistic abuse. Emerging technologies, including generative artificial intelligence, are creating new forms of gender-based harm, such as synthetic intimate imagery. We argue that these experiences must be explicitly recognised within online safety policy and regulation, rather than treated as separate issues.
The Centre’s response further highlights the need to look beyond social media alone. Harmful content, abusive behaviours and problematic recommendation systems operate across this wider digital ecosystem, making it essential that policy responses take a broader and more joined-up approach.
A key theme throughout our submission is the role of platform design. Recommendation algorithms, autoplay functions, infinite scroll and other engagement-driven features can significantly shape what children see online and how long they remain exposed to potentially harmful content. We believe online safety policy must focus not only on content itself, but also on the systems that amplify and distribute it.
The Centre’s recommendations call for stronger implementation and enforcement of existing online safety laws, greater transparency from technology companies, regulation that keeps pace with emerging technologies, and a clear commitment to safety by design as the foundation of future policy. Most importantly, we urge policymakers to ensure that the experiences of girls and young women are fully reflected in efforts to create a safer online world for all children.
