Reflections from the Internet Watch Foundation panel at Labour Party Conference This week, during the Labour Party Conference I sat in a packed room for the Internet Watch Foundation's panel on online harms and UK policy responses. On the panel were Jess Phillips, former safeguarding minister; Ian Murray, Minister for Creative Industries, Media and Online Safety; Kerry Smith , Chief Executive of the IWF; and Catherine Reader from FlippGen, bringing the voices of young people into the room - chaired by Sophie Huskisson, The Daily Mirror.
I asked a question to the panel about displacement, and I want to explain why that one word matters so much to what happens next.
What the panel told us Kerry Smith set out the scale. The IWF is finding more child sexual abuse material, but it is getting harder to find on the open web, with clues shared in encrypted spaces pointing people towards it. AI-generated video is growing quickly and getting more severe. And reports from children being sexually extorted are running at double last year's level for the same period. She was clear about what sextortion actually is: relentless harassment, with demands for the next payment arriving every half hour.
Jess Phillips spoke about normalisation - of self-generated images, of violent pornography, of strangulation - and about something we talk about far too little: the falling age of those doing the harm. Her point that our safeguarding systems still treat online harm as somehow less real than offline harm is something I have unfortunately seen time and time again.
Catherine Reader described young people who feel resigned to the internet they have been given, trading useful revision content for a feed that also serves them something far darker. FlippGen's polling with the Molly Rose Foundation found that a ban with an 'off ramp' for platforms that become safe by design was far more popular with young people than a ban without one.
The Minister was candid. The under-16 ban is, in his words, a blunt tool - but one that says enough is enough. Regulations are due by December, the ban follows next year, and then comes a second stage focused on features and functions, with AI chatbots next in line. He wants the approach to be platform-agnostic, dealing with outcomes rather than inputs.
Why I asked about displacement I welcome the strength of the ban. We not only need regulation, we need it with teeth. But as a criminologist, I know what happens when you close one door on a motivated offender. They do not give up. They move - to a different place, a different method, a different target. Displacement is one of the oldest findings in crime prevention, and it applies online just as it does on a street corner.
Take under-16s off mainstream social media and the people who want access to them will follow them to wherever they go next: gaming platforms, messaging apps, smaller services nobody in Westminster has heard of yet. Those spaces are often harder to see into and less well resourced to respond. The risk is that we make harm less visible without making it less frequent.
To his credit, the Minister did not dodge it. He agreed there will be displacement, said it goes to the heart of the off-ramp debate, and acknowledged that if we fail to deal with it we could end up somewhere worse than where we started. He had already made the point himself earlier in the session: children are groomed on one platform, moved to another, then on to somewhere more hidden - and that is where the greatest harm happens. Jess Phillips's answer was device-level controls, so that safety travels with the child rather than sitting with each app.
Follow the behaviour, not the platform This is exactly the problem we built Tuteliq to address. The research behind our detection starts from the criminological observation that grooming is a pattern of behaviour, and the pattern looks remarkably similar whatever the offender wants at the end of it. Building trust, isolating, testing boundaries, creating obligation, then escalating - it is the same sequence whether the goal is sexual images, money through sextortion, recruiting a money mule, or drawing someone towards extremism.
If the pattern is the constant, then the pattern is what we should be detecting - not a list of named platforms. A platform ban list will always be out of date. Behaviour gives you something that holds when the harm moves, which is why our API is designed to sit across social platforms, gaming platforms and messaging. It is also why 'outcomes rather than inputs' was the most encouraging phrase I heard all morning. Regulation that targets features and behaviours can follow displacement. Regulation that targets brands cannot.
We also need to break the silos The second half of my question was about who is talking to whom. I work closely with financial services on sextortion, because it is a financial crime as much as it is child abuse. The payment is where the harm becomes visible - in gift cards and bank transfers. Yet those conversations sit with different regulators, in different rooms, from the online safety debate.
Kerry Smith made a similar point from another angle. IWF analysts find sites hosting child sexual abuse material alongside links to suicide content, extreme violence and terrorism - but the law divides these up, and the response divides with it. Offenders do not organise themselves around our regulatory boundaries. If Ofcom, the financial regulators, law enforcement and the safety tech sector are each looking at one piece, displacement will happen in the gaps between them.
Where this leaves us I left more hopeful than I expected. Kerry Smith's argument was that government should set the target and tell industry to run at it - as it did with age assurance, which improved rapidly once it was required. The UK has a strong safety tech sector ready to do that work, and I am proud that Tuteliq, with our UK base in Liverpool, is part of it.
But hope needs a plan. As the regulations are written over the coming months, I would like to see three things:
Displacement considerations built into the design from the start, with a clear expectation of where children and offenders will move and how smaller, higher-risk services will be covered. A focus on behaviour and function rather than platform names, so the rules still work when the technology changes. Joined-up working between online safety and financial crime, so that the payment trail and the conversation that led to it are seen as the same offence.
A ban tells us where children should not be. It does not tell us where they will go, or who will be waiting for them there. The only option is to create safer spaces online - for everyone.