There is an opportunity to promote cohesive approaches on digital platforms to make them safer for all users and especially for the most vulnerable – children and youth. This session will highlight innovations, findings and lessons learned from the Tech Coalition Safe Online Research Fund including topics such as cross-cultural research on children’s experiences ranging from peer-to-peer sexual violence to experiences of children with intellectual disabilities; insights on offending behaviour and trends with applications to grooming, deterrence & help-seeking interventions, supply-side offending, etc; and approaches to trauma-informed response and support systems for victims, parents, content moderators, legal systems, etc. Objectives of this interactive session include: 1) highlighting effective ways for researchers and industry to exchange and collaborate in tackling digital harms, 2) sharing insights and knowledge around pioneering online child safety, specifically child sexual exploitation, 3) generating shared principles and approaches for cross-sectoral collaboration across the T&S space.

This workshop session welcomes all roles, focus areas and levels of experience in Trust & Safety. It is meant to enable discussions across different experiences and perspectives to think more deeply about collaboration between the tech sector and researchers. This includes thinking about different barriers and opportunities for different sizes of companies or kinds of platforms or platforms that work across different geographies. Participants with an interest in child safety are welcome as the specific findings shared from the projects will be around online child sexual exploitation and abuse, but topics covered are also applicable to other digital harms.