Children and Young People Are Being Harmed. Politicians Choose to Look Elsewhere.

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I am angry, and I know I’m not alone. Those we choose to run our societies are failing us, and their pattern of failure spans from the international sphere to the micro level of the individual and family right here.

There is a pattern in how those in power behave when they’re challenged after causing harm or allowing harm to occur. They commission reports, pass laws, hold press conferences. They routinely express disingenuous concern loudly enough as a substitute for real action. We have watched this happen at the largest scale imaginable where our governments who supply weapons to forces killing children in Gaza and Iran sit in international forums and speak gravely about the protection of civilians. The same leaders who enable the destruction of hospitals and water infrastructure sign pledges about children’s rights.

This is not confined to any one conflict or any one government. Children and young people in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Sudan, Yemen and beyond are being killed, starved, and permanently damaged by decisions made in capitals that simultaneously sign international conventions on child welfare. Reckless economic policies that play dice with food prices, fuel costs, and housing — decided in finance ministries and trading floors far removed from the children who bear the consequences — are another form of the same betrayal. The child going hungry in a school in England and the child under bombardment in Rafah are not separate problems with separate causes. They are products of the same fundamental malaise: children and young people are the last priority, the ones who absorb the cost of decisions made by and for adults with power.

The disconnect is not simply hypocrisy — it is a structural problem. Politicians act on what is visible and simple enough to sell to the public. What is genuinely complex, difficult, or politically costly they leave untouched.

The UK’s Online Safety Act is a domestic expression of exactly this pattern. The law, which received royal assent in 2023 and has been rolling out in phases since, is framed as child protection legislation. Its premise is that children are significantly endangered by what they encounter online — harmful content, predatory strangers, algorithms pushing them toward risk-taking behaviours, self-harm and pornography. The solution, accordingly, is to regulate online platforms, mandate age verification, and require companies to moderate what users can see. Apple has just extended this into device-level age checks. The stated justification is the safety of the young.

I do not dispute that the online environment poses real risks to children and young people. But I am a psychotherapist. I have spent decades sitting with adults who were harmed as children. I was such a child and teenager myself — one who went entirely under the radar, whose perpetrators lived out their lives without paying any price. The crimes committed against me nearly destroyed me. I am here, alive and well, not thanks to the adult environment around me or any services. It is despite them. I was fortunate enough to find my way out, but I am the exception not the rule. In every society on Earth, regardless of social class or socio-economic status, millions of young lives are destroyed by sexual and other forms of abuse before they get any chance at healthy development.

I can tell you, with the research to back it, that most of what is done to children and young people is not done by random strangers on the internet. It is done by people they know. In their families. In their communities. In institutions that are supposed to protect them. The internet did not create child abuse. The Online Safety Act hands politicians a simplified problem they can pretend to address. In reality, children and young people continue to be neglected, vilified, medicated, and blamed for their own symptoms — symptoms that are a direct reflection of the environment they are surviving in.

Another problem with the Online Safety Act’s underlying logic is that it assumes social media causes harm to otherwise healthy, happy children. But in my clinical experience, the children reaching out to strangers online, seeking validation in chatrooms, turning to social media for comfort, are already hurting. They are already confused, traumatised, frightened, already let down by the adults around them. Children who feel genuinely safe and loved, who have secure relationships they can turn to, do not need the internet to tell them they matter. It is the absence of that security — in the home, in the school, in the community — that drives children toward whatever will make them feel less alone. Restricting what they find there does not address why they went looking in the first place.

The scale of child abuse in the UK is not a secret. The Office for National Statistics estimates that nearly 29% of adults — 13.6 million people — experienced abuse before the age of 18. That figure almost certainly understates the reality. Research consistently finds that self-reported rates of child maltreatment are between 7 and 17 times higher than what official agencies record. Most harm never comes to the attention of any service. Most perpetrators are never identified. The most recent statistics briefing from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) confirms that, based on police-recorded child homicides, at least one child is killed every week in the UK — and that official figures are likely underestimates. These children are not killed by an algorithm or a stranger in a chatroom. Child homicides are most commonly caused by the child’s parent or step-parent.

Scotland, where I live and work, is no exception to this pattern and in some respects makes it starker. The most recent Scottish Government figures show that parents are the primary known or suspected perpetrator for 80% of children on the child protection register. The most common concerns identified at child protection planning meetings are domestic abuse, neglect, parental substance use, parental mental ill health, and emotional abuse — in that order. Nearly half of all children registered live in Scotland’s most deprived communities. The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, established in 2015 and still ongoing, has documented widespread abuse across residential schools, children’s homes, and foster care — institutional settings where safeguarding repeatedly failed, where abuse was reported and not acted on, and where, in some cases, it was actively covered up to protect institutional reputation. Survivors have long called for mandatory reporting to be introduced in Scotland. It has not been. Scotland, like the rest of the UK, has no legal requirement for those who know or strongly suspect a child is being harmed to report it.

The child protection system that exists to prevent this is not functioning as it should, and has not been for some time. Funding for early intervention in England and Wales — the programmes designed to support at-risk children and families before crisis point — has been cut repeatedly while demand has risen. Child protection is delivered by local authorities, and we know how severely those have been squeezed. The result is a system that triages rather than protects: social workers carrying impossible caseloads, schools uncertain whether to escalate concerns and often choosing not to, multi-agency communication that breaks down precisely at the moments it matters most.

I see the consequences of this in my consulting room every week — adults in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties telling me what happened when they were young, what they told people, and what those people did not do. I routinely work with women who escaped domestic abuse but are forced to hand their children over regularly to the abuser because of ‘parental rights’. Domestic abusers — whether controlling and domineering with or without physical violence, or dangerous alcoholics and drug addicts — have already demonstrated their complete unfitness to parent. And yet family courts treat them as if their parental rights are intact. It is the children, and usually their mothers, who suffer most post separation — powerless to protect them, and invisible to a system that doesn’t want to see them. The Online Safety Act changes none of this. Children are not unsafe because of the internet. They are unsafe because the world is unsafe for them.

There is currently no mandatory reporting law in the UK. In most circumstances, a teacher, a GP, a youth worker who knows or strongly suspects a child is being abused is not legally required to report it. Mandatory reporting exists in Australia, the United States, Canada, and much of Europe. The arguments against introducing it in the UK tend to centre on professional judgement and the risk of overwhelming an already strained system with referrals. In reality, the system protects itself and consistently places the rights of adults ahead of the rights of children and young people.

What would actually protect children is not that complicated. It would require mandatory reporting, with clear legal consequences for failure to act on reasonable suspicion. It would require properly funded child protection services — not empty words about early intervention accompanied by cuts to the budgets that deliver it. It would require schools that are trained and legally obligated to raise safeguarding concerns, understanding that a referral is not an accusation, not an arrest, not a conviction — it is the beginning of an inquiry. It would require a law that automatically classifies domestic abuse in families with children as child abuse. And it would require a family court system that is not so overwhelmed that children wait months or years for decisions about their safety.

The Online Safety Act does produce a story that politicians like. It has a named villain — tech companies, algorithms, online platforms, social media — powerful enough to seem like worthy adversaries, yet remote enough from the real sites of harm that attacking them offends nobody and costs nothing. It has a mechanism — age verification, content moderation, platform liability — that is visible and enforceable and generates headlines each time a company is fined or a new requirement kicks in. It has a measure: the number of children blocked from accessing harmful content, a figure that can be cited in Parliament and in manifestos. What it does not have is any serious relationship to where child harm actually originates, or how it might actually be reduced.

This is not accidental. Politicians are not stupid. They know what the research shows about where abuse happens and who perpetrates it. The data are publicly available. They know the child protection system is understaffed and underfunded. They know that mandatory reporting has been debated and repeatedly deferred. They know domestic abuse victims and their children are routinely let down by services. But they choose to act on what is visible, what makes them look as if they are doing something about a very serious problem when in reality they are doing nothing of substance. The Online Safety Act is not just inadequate but functions as a displacement activity that actively obscures the real drivers of harm to children. It is a monument to political opportunism and cowardice and in itself a form of active harm. Every year spent performing child protection is a year not spent delivering it, and children and young people continue to be hurt in the places where cameras aren’t pointing.

What we choose to see — and not to see — says everything about us. Politicians choose to see the dangerous algorithm, the harmful post, the unverified adult. They choose not to see the child in a home where something is wrong, the teacher who noticed and said nothing, the referral that was never made, the social worker with forty-three other cases. They have built an elaborate architecture for managing the former. The latter continues largely as it was.

I began with the international scale because the psychology is the same. The capacity to act on what is visible and politically convenient while leaving the real causes of problems untouched is not a structural inevitability. It is a choice made by people who are self-serving, lacking in empathy, and fundamentally cowardly — pragmatic enough to do what is convenient for their own positions and pensions, and unprincipled enough to call it leadership. Not every politician fits this description. But the shape of the system reflects who holds power within it.

Bombing a country and passing an age verification law are obviously not equivalent acts. But they share the same absence of accountability for the conditions that produce harm. And in both cases it is ordinary people — ordinary children — who pay the price. The children who are failed today will be the adults in my consulting room tomorrow — if they make it that far. They are suffering because the world is harming them, and those who could fix it choose not to.

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