Continued Delays to Online Safety Bill

Continuing on from my previous blog post I have been reading a disturbing article by the amazing people at the Internet Watch Foundation…

Continuing on from my previous blog post I have been reading a disturbing article by the amazing people at the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF).

⚠️Trigger Warning — The linked article above and my post below will contain triggering content.

Believe me when I tell you that the old adage of “This will hurt me more than it hurts you” has never been truer than in this instance as reading the above article by the IWF was horrific for me and I will suffer because of it, I will also suffer greatly by writing this blog post. My suffering though will still pale in significance to the suffering and trauma experienced by the children described in the article and many thousands more around the world.

In the strongest possible terms, I ask each and every one of you who read this to contact your MP and instruct, yes instruct them, the time for requests has now passed so please instruct them to ensure that those Online Safety Bill is pushed through parliament without any more delay. I don’t want to hear any more lip service being paid by the PM stating that he looks forward to bringing the bill back to the house ‘in due course’ The anger I feel at that one statement is probably palpable in the way I am choosing to write this post, whilst they procrastinate it is estimated that 100 grooming offences are being committed each and every day, 100 children abused, scarred and changed forever!

Just in case anybody who actually has any influence decides to read this post, let’s discuss what is actually involved in that and what the IWF have found during their research.

Over a five-day period, analysts at the child protection charity found nearly 900 instances of the most severe form of child sexual abuse material, Category A, involving either sexual penetration acts of bestiality or sadism. All the criminal content was of a “self-generated” nature.

Thankfully many of you read the previous paragraph and probably only have to ‘think’ how bad that sounds, let me tell you that the visual is hundreds and thousands of times worse, there is a human child involved with feelings, thoughts, emotions and a long road ahead of them. Children as young as seven are being coerced into inserting household items such as pencils and toothbrushes into their vaginas and anuses for the sexual gratification of online predators. The IWF article goes into far greater detail than I have the strength to write about, but it should be noted that grooming offences, far from being on a decline are rising exponentially and all the while the laws that could help to combat that are being delayed!

I have mentioned before one of the most haunting things I deal with is the look on the face of the victims and to look into the eyes and sometimes I feel like I am staring right into their souls. This may be hard for people to read and I make no apologies whatsoever for that, I want you to feel horrified, I want you to be angry, and I want you to cry because this is happening every day in your community and in every community around this planet that we call home.

The war in Ukraine kicked off and immediately every nation wanted to be seen to do its part to support the Ukrainian people and rightly so because, from personal experience, wars and the effect it has on people are horrific. I want to see the same enthusiasm to act in this war though! The war against sexual predators who are destroying so many innocent lives as the list of casualties just keeps growing. I wouldn’t even want to estimate how many people have been affected by child abuse over the years, the victims, the families, the therapists who care for them, the analysts who investigate the images, and the list goes on but I can imagine that the number probably outweighs that of all wars added together.

Again I ask you to read the IWF article above and take action NOW! Please don’t just move on with your day and if you have any respect for me or understanding for what I go through then please take a moment to email your MP and apply pressure to have this extremely important bill pushed through parliament without any further delay.

As I publish this post I will be sending a link of it to my own MP.

Originally published at https://cybersafetyguy.com on November 21, 2022.