Victims of child sexual abuse in England and Wales are getting a new tool to scrub their worst memories from the internet, as part of a government-backed effort to end what officials politely call the 'prolonged suffering of survivors' - because apparently, simply hoping for it hasn't worked.
The Echo project, launching Tuesday at the International Policing and Public Protection Research Institute (IPPPRI) annual conference, will help victims who've already reported their abuse to police identify and remove online images of their assault. Alongside image removal, survivors get trauma support, the chance to have a victim impact statement read in court, and the option of criminal or civil compensation. Because nothing says 'closure' like a little courtroom theater and a potential check.
Simon Bailey, former national lead for child protection and chief constable of Norfolk, who is involved in the project, put it bluntly: '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 succeeds, it will be rolled out globally - because trauma, apparently, is universal.
The project is funded by online safety and child abuse charities Safe Online and the Graham Dacre Foundation. Police forces across the country are expected to identify and refer victims to Echo, which will have access to the UK's child abuse image database to find content on the open web and request its removal, facilitated by the Internet Watch Foundation. Bailey explained that images will be matched to victims using the unique reference number on their original crime report - a bureaucratic efficiency that's almost refreshing.
Take Rhiannon-Faye McDonald, who was groomed in 2003 by a man in his mid-50s pretending to be a teenage girl online. At 13, she was coerced into sending a topless photo, then blackmailed into sending more. '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,' she recalled. He then got her address, came to her home, and sexually abused her in her bedroom, taking photos of the assault. When police contacted her at 14, she hesitated: 'I didn't even want to call the police... I thought I would get blamed for it.'
Now, more than 20 years later, McDonald is director of services at the Marie Collins Foundation. She notes the technological shift: '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. There's more opportunities for perpetrators to find, contact, groom and abuse them.'
McDonald supports the Echo project, which she says will 'hand back a bit of control' to victims. '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,' she said. 'It's just always there in your brain. It's a horrible way to live so any kind of control to help is incredible.' She emphasized that victims need hope 'because it really does feel like the end of everything.'
The project arrives alongside Prime Minister Keir Starmer's September deadline for tech firms including Apple and Google to install software blocking explicit images on children's phones, or face legislation forcing them to do so. Starmer claims this will make the UK the first country in the world to make it impossible for children to take, share, or view nude images - a bold promise that tech companies will surely greet with enthusiasm and compliance.