I've Seen Horrible Things: Children's Experiences of the Online World

The Children's Commissioner for England released a major report drawing on responses from 253,000 children and adults to The Big Ambition, a large-scale consultation carried out between September 2023 and January 2024. The report illustrates the extent to which children are still experiencing harm online one year after passage of the Online Safety Act, with children citing the scale of online sexual abuse and exposure to sexualised content and the impact it has on them. Children reported experiencing harms both as specific types of harmful content and in terms of service design, identifying concerns about exposure to highly sexualised content and abuse between users.

Targeted detection addresses the underlying harm documented in this report without waiting for legislation to be fully implemented. Guardii's real-time monitoring identifies harmful patterns in direct messages, whether sustained targeting, escalation or coercion, across the platforms children actually use. The system blocks or flags hostile contact before it reaches the target, surfaces a child in crisis to a parent or school, and enables rapid escalation to the right authority in an emergency, providing immediate operational protection for the harms children themselves are reporting rather than relying on regulatory timelines that move slower than the growth of new threats.