A government minister has admitted that banning under-16s from social media will not stop predators seeking out children online - it will simply push the problem somewhere harder to see. That admission, made during a panel discussion at the Labour Party Conference hosted by the Internet Watch Foundation, cuts to the heart of a debate that will shape child safety policy for years to come. The panel brought together Jess Phillips, the former safeguarding minister; Ian Murray, Minister for Creative Industries, Media and Online Safety; Kerry Smith, Chief Executive of the IWF; and Catherine Reader of FlippGen, with Sophie Huskisson of The Daily Mirror in the chair.
The scale of the problem described in that room was sobering. Kerry Smith told the audience that the IWF is finding more child sexual abuse material than ever, even as it becomes harder to locate on the open web, with offenders increasingly using encrypted spaces to share clues and signpost access. AI-generated abuse imagery is growing quickly and becoming more severe. Reports of children being sexually extorted are running at double last year's rate. For families trying to protect children at home, basic technical safeguards still matter alongside policy change - things like securing a home network, for instance by learning how to set up a VPN on your router, sit alongside broader protections rather than replacing them, since no single tool solves a problem this layered.
Jess Phillips raised a point that deserves more attention than it gets: the age of those committing online harm is falling, and our safeguarding systems still treat digital abuse as somehow less serious than its offline equivalent. Catherine Reader, bringing the perspective of young people through FlippGen's work, described a generation resigned to an internet that mixes useful content with something far darker. Polling conducted with the Molly Rose Foundation found that young people were far more supportive of a ban that included an "off ramp" for platforms proven to be safe by design, rather than a blanket prohibition.
The displacement problem
The under-16 ban, due to take effect next year following regulations expected by December, is a blunt instrument by the Minister's own description - but one intended to send an unambiguous signal. A second stage will follow, targeting specific features and functions, with AI chatbots next on the list for scrutiny. The ambition, he said, is to make the approach platform-agnostic: regulating outcomes rather than naming individual services.
That ambition matters because of a principle well established in criminology: close off one avenue to a motivated offender and they do not simply stop. They relocate - to gaming platforms, messaging apps, or services that barely register in policy discussions yet. These spaces are frequently harder to monitor and less equipped to respond. Remove children from mainstream platforms without addressing where they land next, and the risk is that harm becomes less visible without becoming less common. The Minister did not dispute this. He agreed displacement is inevitable, said it sits at the center of the off-ramp debate, and warned that failing to address it could leave children worse off than before. Phillips pointed to device-level controls as one answer, so protection travels with the child rather than remaining tied to any single app.
Why behaviour matters more than brand names
Grooming follows a recognisable pattern regardless of its ultimate aim - building trust, isolating the target, testing boundaries, creating obligation, then escalating. That sequence looks much the same whether the end goal is sexual imagery, financial extortion, recruitment into criminal activity, or radicalisation. A regulatory list of named platforms will always lag behind where offenders actually operate. Detection systems built around behavioural patterns, by contrast, can follow harm wherever it moves - across social media, gaming, and messaging alike.
Breaking down regulatory silos
A second gap concerns coordination. Sextortion is a financial crime as much as a safeguarding one, yet the people who understand payment fraud rarely sit in the same room as those drafting online safety rules. Kerry Smith noted that IWF analysts routinely find child abuse material hosted alongside content promoting suicide, extreme violence and terrorism - categories the law treats separately, even though offenders make no such distinction. Closing that gap, alongside building displacement into the design of future regulation from the outset, will determine whether this policy protects children or simply moves the danger out of sight.