Child sexual abuse victims in England and Wales to get help to remove online images

Victims of child sexual abuse in England and Wales will be given help to remove online images of their abuse as part of a wider package of support to end the “prolonged suffering of survivors”.The Echo project will help those who have reported their abuse to the police to identify and remove images of abuse online. They will also be given trauma support, the possibility of having a victim impact statement read in court against their perpetrators and the opportunity of criminal or civil compensation.Simon Bailey, the former national lead for child protection and chief constable of Norfolk, who is involved in the Echo project, said: “Children were being rescued but once the initial investigation into their child sexual abuse had been concluded, they just became another victim.” He hopes, if the programme is successful, it would be rolled out globally.It is being launched on Tuesday at the International Policing and Public Protection Research Institute (IPPPRI) annual conference. It is funded by the online safety and child abuse charities Safe Online and the Graham Dacre Foundation.Police forces across the country are assisting with the project. They are expected to identify and refer victims of child sexual abuse to Echo. The project will have access to the UK’s child abuse image database to help identify content on the open web and request its removal. This will be facilitated by the Internet Watch Foundation.AI is not involved in the project.Bailey said after images from the UK’s child abuse image database are found online, victims will be identified by matching the unique reference number found on their crime report when their abuse was reported.Rhiannon-Faye McDonald was groomed in 2003 by a man in his mid-50s who was pretending to be a teenage girl online. She was 13 years old when the abuse happened. At first, she was asked to send “innocent photos” of herself and later “coerced and manipulated” into sending a topless photo which was used to blackmail her into sending more photographs.“I was so terrified. He threatened that everybody would see the photo that I’d already shared, that he would send it to my friends and post it up around my school. I didn’t feel like I had any choice but to send more,” she said.He then blackmailed Rhiannon into sending her address. “He came to my home the following morning, and he sexually abused me in my bedroom,” she said. He took photos of the assault and again threatened to share the images.When McDonald was 14, the police contacted her. “I didn’t even want to call the police because even though I knew it was wrong and he shouldn’t have done that, I thought I would get blamed for it,” she said.More than 20 years on, McDonald is director of services at the Marie Collins Foundation. “When my abuse happened, it was on a desktop computer in my bedroom with MSN or AOL Messenger. Now kids have got smartphones in their pockets that are more powerful than any computers that we had back then,” she said. “There’s more opportunities for perpetrators to find, contact, groom and abuse them.”McDonald supports the project, which will “hand back a bit of control” to victims of child sexual abuse. She said: “I try not to live in fear of those images but it’s really hard not to because we don’t know if and when they might resurface.“We don’t know if people recognise us from them. It’s just always there in your brain. It’s a horrible way to live so any kind of control to help is incredible.”McDonald said it was important that victims and survivors have hope “because it really does feel like the end of everything”.She added: “It’s really important to know that it wasn’t your fault. The shame doesn’t belong to them, it belongs to the perpetrator. There are lots of people out there who believe, support and do not judge you and want to help. While it can feel like this is going to define you for the rest of your life, it doesn’t.”The project comes as Keir Starmer gave tech firms, including Apple and Google, a September deadline to install software that blocks explicit images on children’s mobile phones or face legislation enforcing its requirement.The prime minister said it would make the UK the first country in the world to make it impossible for children to take, share or view nude images.