Fight The New Drug (00:00)
Well, Alexandra, thank you so much for joining us today on Consider Before Consuming. To start, can you tell us a bit about who you are and what led you into forensic psychology?

Alexandra Bailey (00:09)
So, obviously, I’m Alexandra Bailey. I am the Head of Psychology for Lucy Faithfull Foundation and I’m also an Associate Professor at the University of Roehampton in London, England.

In terms of my journey into Forensic Psychology, so I’m a registered and chartered Forensic Psychologist in the UK, which means obviously I’m practising over here as well as engaging in academia.

So I started with doing my undergrad degree in psychology, doing my master’s degree in forensic psychology. But during my undergraduate degree, I started doing, I did actually volunteer work for the Lucy Faithfull Foundation for a period of time. And during that work that I was doing, I was just very struck by the work that the foundation does. It was very clear to me that looking at prevention, prevention of child sexual abuse was a valuable way to be heading and recognize very quickly that working with people who may pose a risk to children is a very good means in which to try and prevent offending from happening. So that became something that was quite clear to me quite quickly and stayed with me after that.

So after I finished my undergraduate degree, I came back to the foundation. I then became an assistant psychologist at the foundation and continued with my educational career doing my master’s. So I’ve actually been at the foundation for 20 years. I have worked in other settings alongside that.

So I’ve worked within the UK Prison Service. I’ve worked within forensic secure hospitals in regard to lots of different types of offending behavior as well as sort of people with mental disorder who also have forensic histories. But through that 20 years I’ve always stayed in some way or form with the foundation just because I believe so strongly in the work around prevention.

Fight The New Drug (02:25)
Amazing. And for anyone who’s unfamiliar with the foundation, can you just tell us quickly what it is the foundation does?

Alexandra Bailey (02:31)
Sure, so Lucy Faithfull Foundation is a child protection charity in the UK. We are the only national charity in the UK that deals solely with child sexual abuse. And actually, the focus that we have is on the prevention of abuse. So we have lots of different services around that. I think we’re going to talk a little bit later about our Stop It Now service, so I won’t say too much about that now.

But all of our work is focused on: how do we prevent child sexual abuse in the first instance, because what we want to ensure is that further victims are not created? We believe that child sexual abuse is preventable, that it’s not inevitable. So that’s the focus of the foundation.

Fight The New Drug (03:17)
Wonderful. In your experience working with individuals who have committed sexual offenses, what do people most to misunderstand most about how these behaviors develop?

Alexandra Bailey (03:29)
So I think because of the narrative that’s put out there, particularly the narrative probably in the media, you know, what we kind of see all around us, I think there is an automatic assumption that anybody who’s committed a sexual offence against a child has done so because they’ve got a primary sexual interest in children. Now, don’t get me wrong, some people who commit sexual offences absolutely do have that sexual interest in children, but actually there’s a lot of people
where that’s not the case and that offences have been committed for other reasons that aren’t related interest in children. And I’m sure we’re going to talk about some of those reasons as we continue today.

Fight The New Drug (04:16)
Pornography being one of those, you know, influences out there. It’s free, it’s accessible, it’s anonymous, and it’s often more extreme in previous decades. So with the internet, the way that individuals can access this content and what the content is tends to be more extreme. From your perspective, how has that shift changed the landscape of online sexual offending against children?

Alexandra Bailey (04:41)
So I think what you’ve hit on there is about the way that the access to pornography has changed with the invention of the internet. So now, when people are accessing pornography online, it is very easily accessible, but they also have access to an abundance of sexual material that they wouldn’t have had access to offline.

And that means there are lots of places to search, there are lots of places for people to go, there are lots of things for them to look at that maybe they never even thought of existed, or never even considered that it might be something that they might be interested in looking at. And so we’ve got to recognise that with the internet coming in, that’s something that it has provided.

Now, going back to what we were talking about a minute ago, which was there being other reasons as to why people might commit sexual offences, and particularly, we’re talking here about online sexual offending against children. One of the things that we hear from people is that the use of adult pornography has been like a gateway in regard to their offending behaviour. And they talk about this in regard to escalation.

In terms of accessing pornography over a prolonged period of time, adult pornography, and becoming somewhat desensitized to this. So the pornography that they were viewing is not giving them the same level of gratification that it used to. And therefore, they start to search for more extreme material, different material, novel material, in order to give them the same level of gratification that they were experiencing begin with. And therefore as that behaviour escalates and starts to look into other areas of sexual material which are available, widely available because of the internet, those boundaries, that escalation gets pushed and then people have stated that within that journey they’ve been accessing child sexual abuse material alongside that. So, although what we don’t say and what we can’t say is that it’s the internet’s fault that people are engaging in this kind of behaviour and accessing child sexual abuse material, we can recognise that there’s been a facilitation here and that the availability of pornography means that there are some individuals that are viewing sexual imagery including sexual imagery of children that they probably would not have viewed had it not been available online.

Fight The New Drug (07:38)
Right. You co-authored a paper called What’s Porn Got to Do With It, and you described that adult pornography as frequently being part of that pathway toward viewing sexual images of children. And as you just kind of illustrated here, is there a typical way you could describe that pathway, what that pathway typically looks like for individuals who find themselves there?

Alexandra Bailey (08:04)
So, quite often, what individuals are telling us is that their use of adult pornography becomes problematic. So that may be that they realise that they’re using it more than they did before or more than they intended to. So that frequency kind of increases. It may be that a session of pornography use, that’s turning into a longer time, you know, where they were on there for half an hour to an hour, it’s now turning into three, four hours, you know, and they’re not knowing where the time is going. They’re finding that they’re not going to bed with other members of their family. They’re staying up at night on their own, looking at pornography. They are choosing to look at pornography over doing other things with their life, you know, going out with friends, it might be interfering with their work, interfering with their family life.

So they’re recognizing that, actually, that pornography use, adult pornography use, is becoming problematic for them. And then what they describe is what we were talking about a minute ago, which is about this desensitization, about this escalation of use in terms of what they’re actually looking at. So they’re finding that over time, the adult pornography that they were viewing just isn’t actually giving them the same level of arousal or the same level of gratification. So they start to look for something different. They start to look for something more extreme, more novel in order to receive that same level of arousal that they were getting before. So there’s this gradual kind of pushing and pushing of the boundaries.

And that just doesn’t… We’re talking about child sexual abuse material, see, because we’re talking about online sexual offending. But this can also include pornography that’s more violent, for example, or includes more taboo subjects like incest, maybe, or includes pornography that involves animals, so bestiality, for example. But all of these things are showing this kind of escalation and this look for more and more extreme and novel material as a way to keep their level of arousal at the same place that it was before.

Fight The New Drug (10:35)
And some people hear this and think these individuals are just making choices, or it’s just about wants or needs. Can you describe what’s happening psychologically and neurologically in that process that leads individuals on this path?

Alexandra Bailey (10:50)
Well, I’m not a neuropsychologist, so I probably wouldn’t be able to explain it as eloquently as somebody who was. But we certainly know that there are processes and chemicals within the brain that are related to things like anticipation. So let’s take dopamine, for example. And sometimes we want to know what’s happening with pornography to what we sometimes call the slot machine effect, which is the fact that people will get a release of dopamine, which is a plethora of experience in relation to this anticipation.

So the reason it’s referred to as the slot machine effect is it’s often something that people report while playing slot machines and while gambling, which is putting money down on things, pulling the lever because…what’s going to happen next? Might I win on the next one? Is it going to be all? Could be the next one?

And that anticipation and the kind of excited arousal that comes with that helps people keep going. And that’s the release of that dopamine. People can talk about a very similar experience when it comes to pornography use. So this kind of feeling of what’s next? What’s next? If I click on this link, what might I find there?

And the anticipation of finding that something novel, that something different, and that excited arousal that kind of comes with that. Now, it’s interesting what you say in terms of people making choices, because actually, people are making choices. That’s what’s happening. People aren’t on autopilot when they do this. They don’t come out of it and go, what just happened? I completely don’t remember that. But what we’re talking about here

Fight The New Drug (12:31)
Yes.

Alexandra Bailey (12:43)
is things that are contributing to that decision-making process. And this is one of the things that’s contributing, is the way that our mind, our brain might reinforce certain behaviors. Because even if we go right to the basic level of reinforcement, and we think about what reinforcement means, which is that if we are rewarded for, you know, with some kind of stimulus, it makes us more likely to want to have that stimulus because we’re going to be rewarded.

Now, what is sexual gratification to pornography in itself, if not a reward? And therefore, that is a reinforcement process that people can go through, which is they become aware and they know that pornography isn’t a stimulus that gives them that reward.

And therefore, if they’re also experiencing that anticipation, they’re looking for something novel, it’s resulting in them experiencing an increased level of arousal, excited arousal, that again is rewarding and starts to reinforce and encourage that behaviour.

Fight The New Drug (14:00)
Yeah, that’s so well said. I think so often we start with the choice, which, yes, absolutely, individuals are making choices, then we miss the rest of the process, which is some of everything you’ve just articulated so well.

And then also some of the other things you deal with in work, like how much factors like trauma or depression. mental health, generally shame, social isolation, play into someone’s pornography use escalating. Can you speak a little bit about that?

Alexandra Bailey (14:32)
Sure, so one of the things that we do know is that if we come back to the fact that sex is rewarding, sex is a pleasurable thing, there are some people that use sex as a way of coping. There are some where perhaps they didn’t learn the best ways to deal with their difficult feelings, for whatever reason that may be.

If we think about the issue of trauma,there are people that may have been through trauma in childhood, they may have experienced abuse, there may have been difficulties within their relationships with their parents, maybe growing up. And we know that those things are very influential as to how people learn to deal with their problems in life. And dealing with feelings is very big part of that.

So actually, if you’ve got somebody that didn’t really develop what we might call pro-social coping strategies to deal with their feelings,

Sex is sometimes a way in which people do that because sex makes people feel better. So if somebody is feeling depressed, if they’re feeling lonely, if they’re feeling isolated, they can be using sex as a way of trying to make themselves feel better. It can become a go-to in terms of coping strategies.

And you’ve mentioned shame there. And I think shame is a really important thing to talk about because if somebody is using these kind of coping strategies, if they have gone on to a pathway where they’re accessing more and more extreme material, including then maybe even offending online and accessing child sexual abuse material, shame is a huge part of that because lots of the people that we talk to feel incredibly ashamed about what they were doing.

And one of the things that shame can do, is it can result in people, for want of a better term, burying their head in the sand in terms of there actually being a problem to deal with. Shame stops people reaching out. It stops people talking to somebody else about what’s going on for them. It stops them reaching out for professional support, even if they know that things have got to a problematic place.

So it’s really important for us to address the issue of shame and for us to talk about these things so that people know, one, that there is somewhere to go where they can get help and stop the pathway that they’re on, but also to know that we understand that that’s difficult for people. We understand that they feel shame, but actually this shame is creating a barrier for them to stop. That shame is encouraging a cycle to continue.

So recognizing that and encouraging people to talk and come forward is really important.

Fight The New Drug (17:27)
And for so many people, shame is an approach that they take to addressing this topic. And it’s so important for us to remember that if we truly want people to change behavior, shame is something that is keeping people stuck in these cycles that we’re advocating for change on. So it is something that’s such an important part of this conversation.

Pivoting just a bit, we’ve spoken about how the internet has influenced individuals who are consuming this content and what these trajectories look like, but how has the internet changed the trajectory of sexual offending compared to previous decades?

Alexandra Bailey (18:02)
So I think it’s very clear that we can acknowledge that and I think I mentioned it before that there will be individuals who have offended as a result of what’s been available on the internet.

Now, as I said before, it’s not the internet’s fault, there are people on pathways and people making choices. But if we think about previously, if somebody wanted to get a hold of child sexual abuse material, for example, it took a lot of effort and it took a lot of ability to know where to get that from. Equally, if somebody wanted to groom a child offline, there are lots of barriers in place for that. There are other adults around, there are protective circles around children. There are lots of steps that somebody would need to go to in order to groom a child. Actually, what the internet has done is taken away some of those barriers and made some of those things easier.

So we know that children and young people are online, engaging in chat rooms. We know that adults are then using those chat rooms with a means to talk to and groom children and young people.

So when we’ve got children and young people at home, you know, maybe on their own in front of the internet, with adults not present at that point in time, that’s a barrier that’s been removed. And the availability then of child sexual abuse material online means that a barrier has been removed. It doesn’t take as much effort to get there.

So we know that the numbers of people that are engaging in online sexual offending behaviour is increasing to the point where we also know that the numbers means that it’s not a problem that we can rely on law enforcement for. We cannot arrest our way out of this problem, which is why prevention services are so important.

So having places where people who recognize that their behavior is problematic, and they don’t actually want to continue doing this have somewhere to go. But also one of the other things that we do at Lucy Faithful Foundation is we have a project called Project Intercept, and it’s very much about disruption and deterrence on the internet.

So putting messages online in places that we know are likely to be places of risk, making it very clear to individuals who might be thinking about online sexual offending in some way or are engaged in that behaviour, letting them know what the consequences of that are, because I think sometimes the internet can feel like this anonymous place where nobody knows what you’re doing, which is not true, because people are being detected for this kind of behavior every single day.

But it can make people feel like that. It can make people feel that it’s anonymous or that it’s just me sitting behind the screen. It’s not really real. It’s not really harmful.

So, making sure those messages are being put across to people, but also making them aware that there is a way out. There is a pathway out. There is a way to stop this. And there is an ability to seek help.

And I mean, as we’re going to talk about our Stop It Now services, that’s one of the ways in which people can do that.

Fight The New Drug (21:51)
Yeah, which is such important work.

I want to ask you a little bit about child-on-child sexual abuse. That’s something that a lot of what we’re talking about, anyone listening who’s less familiar might think we’re just talking about adult offenders of online sexual abuse of children. And can you speak at all to the way that child-on-child sexual abuse has increased with the advent of the internet and accessibility of pornography?

Alexandra Bailey (22:16)
So, I think one of the things we have to recognise is we’ve got lots of generations in the population at the moment. So we’ve got older generations who did not grow up with the internet. you know, it still maybe in some ways feels fairly new and people are still getting used to it.

My generation, I didn’t grow up with the internet, but I got the internet fairly young. I think I was probably in university when I got the internet, you know, I am of the generation that’s helping my mum do online banking and, you know, that sort of thing.

But then there’s generations below me who have always had the internet. It has been a very normalised part of their life. That way of communicating and engaging with people via online messages, via mobile phones, that is the normal part of everyday life.

And of course, with that has become the rise of things like sexting, which, of course, is something that is going on a lot with younger people in younger generations. And a lot of younger people don’t necessarily recognize one, that if they take a sexualized picture of themselves and they’re under 18, that they’re actually taking a child sexual abuse image. They don’t know that when they send that on to somebody else, they’re distributing that image. But also they don’t necessarily understand the permanency of putting those images online or of sending them or of sending one to their friends if, you know, them and their partner then have a fight and break up or something along those lines.

So there are lots of behaviors that have been normalized within a younger generation, which actually can be hugely harmful and are breaking the law. Now, we know that police do not want to go around arresting young people for being young people. You know, that’s not the plan. It’s not about criminalizing everybody for developing and for testing the world, but sometimes this can go too far. And that can include young people going online and looking for sexual images of people their own age.

Now, it’s not age-inappropriate in that sense, you know, developmental-wise, that’s not inappropriate. But actually, these are images that are being created and being shared often without somebody’s consent. They are non-consensual sexual images, which, of course, is incredibly harmful and an offence.

So we know that although, you know, all of this technology and the internet becoming so normalised for younger generations also means that this kind of sexual behaviour online is becoming normalized without necessarily the recognition of the harmfulness of it or the illegality of it.

Fight The New Drug (25:45)
Right. And for so many young people, it’s only escalating with advancements in technology, right? So with the rise of AI tools, some that can, you know, simulate sexual conversations or generate explicit images, like we’re seeing with Grok, what concerns are emerging in your field as these tools and every day, it’s like there’s a new way that this technology is fueling these things.

Alexandra Bailey (26:12)
Yeah, and I mean, it is concerning. So if we think about AI and things like that, AI can do some wonderful things, and it can be incredibly helpful. The same way as the internet, you know, the internet can be a wonderful thing. It’d be great for research, for education, for all sorts of things. But like the internet, AI, these kind of new technologies have a darker side to them and a more unhelpful side.

One of the things that can be really concerning about that is actually what it can lead people to think is that what they’re doing is not harmful. So if you’re creating an image via AI or something, people might then be thinking, well, actually, it’s not a real image, so it’s not hurting anyone. Or if they’re viewing what they believe to be AI images, that this is victimless, that it’s not hurting anyone.

But actually, that’s not true. So first of all, there are lots of AI-generated images that are based on real children and real people. So they can be using real children’s images. They can be images of real children that have then been altered and doctored. They can be images of real people that have been nudified. So we talk about deep fakes and things like that. So these kind of nudified images that are being done.

So there’s that element of things, which is actually just because something’s had an AI lens over it doesn’t mean there’s not a real child behind that and a real child that’s being harmed because of that. But also what this is doing, it’s normalizing this thing. By creating images in this way, it’s normalizing the sexualization of children.

We don’t want to be in a society that normalizes the sexualization of children. So even if these images are 100% AI generated, for example, there’s still a harm and a concern in that in terms of the normalization.

Fight The New Drug (28:30)
Right, especially as it becomes more normalized for people and lowers inhibitions of things that might otherwise feel unacceptable. And that’s a concern with AI, right?

Alexandra Bailey (28:42)
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I mean, this is one of the things that in the UK, we’ve recently had a pornography review. And one of the things that was related to this was the fact that there is pornography available online, which isn’t illegal, which would be illegal, offline. And that seems very much a disconnect. You know, if it would be illegal offline, then really it should be illegal online as well.

And so if it isn’t, if all of this stuff is still accessible and all of these things are created, it does things that people would see as being unacceptable before can seem more acceptable. As we know, even mainstream pornography is becoming more violent. You know, there are more acts of, particularly, violence against women in mainstream pornography. If we think about things like slapping, gagging, choking, all of these things are becoming more normal, which I’m sure if you asked a lot of people whether that was an acceptable thing to do in your sexual relationship with your partner, they’d probably be saying, no, it isn’t. But if it’s so available online, actually what we end up with is people we know from research with young people who are accessing pornography, that pornography is starting to have an impact on what they think is normal in sexual relationships. And if pornography is getting more extreme, more violent, if it’s including children, younger people, then that’s going to translate to what people think is normal within sexual relationships.

Fight The New Drug (30:33)
Right, especially for young people who are often seeing these things in pornography before anyone has ever spoken to them about healthy sex or healthy relationships. So they’re developing their sexual template from these things, and they don’t actually know that there are alternative options because this is what’s presented to them.

Alexandra Bailey (30:44)
Yeah, absolutely.

Fight The New Drug (30:51)
So you’ve mentioned a couple of times now your resource called Stop It Now for the Lucy Faithfull Foundation. Can you explain a little bit about what that and prevention services like it play in stopping harm before it happens?

Alexandra Bailey (31:07)
Absolutely. So Stop It Now, which is one of our projects…Stop It Now has a number of services. So, for example, we have a helpline that people can call. We have an online chat service and we also have a secure messaging service like secure email services. But the focus on the point of all of these services are the same.

So anybody can contact Stop It Now services about any concerns at all to do with child sexual abuse, and that’s including people who were concerned about themselves. So, people who are concerned about their own, maybe thoughts or behaviour towards children can contact Stop It Now and get advice and support around how they manage their behaviour, how that they ensure that their behaviour doesn’t escalate. So they don’t go on to harm children.

So the point of it, as I say, is about that prevention. But we also receive contacts from adults who might be concerned about another adult’s behaviour. So they’ve seen something or they know something that they’re uncomfortable with, that they’re not sure about, and they can contact us for advice on what the next steps might be in relation to sort of child safeguarding and child protection. We also get calls from parents.

So parents whose children may have engaged in harmful sexual behaviour, but also parents who are concerned that their child might have been abused or exploited in some way, including online. We also support professionals. So professionals in the UK who might have a case and they’re not really sure what to do, it might be complex, they might want some advice about the next steps, can contact Stop It Now to get that advice.

But as you mentioned, all of those services are anonymous and confidential. And it’s very important that they are anonymous and confidential, because if they weren’t, people wouldn’t call them. Now, we’re very clear that if somebody contacted our services and they gave us identifying information about themselves, and they told us that they committed an offense, or we believe that there was a child at risk, that we would be reporting that information, we would be passing it on. But the way that our service works is that people don’t have to give us any identifying information about themselves. And what that does is it opens up an avenue for people who would be too frightened or too anxious to speak to anybody else about their behaviour or speak to another professional, say a GP, for example.

You can’t be anonymous with your doctor, not in the UK, and they would then be reported for that. So, therefore, if it wasn’t for, say, the service we have, those people wouldn’t be talking to anybody, and they wouldn’t be getting any support. And therefore, the cycle, the escalation would likely continue. So by providing a service that is anonymous and confidential,

We are providing an avenue for people who are concerned about their own thoughts and behaviour about children to come forward and get the support and the help that they need to ensure that behaviour doesn’t escalate or doesn’t go forward to abusing children and creating victims.

Fight The New Drug (34:51)
Yeah, which is so critical. Again, I think that’s a part of this conversation that people often don’t want to acknowledge is that if we really want to create change, we have to help the individuals who are…facilitating this abuse to change as well. And so it’s removing shame as we spoke about earlier and providing these resources where people can reach out. And sometimes it is, you know, maybe someone accidentally accessed something or saw something somewhere else, and they don’t know what to do. You know, no one trains us to know what to do in those scenarios. And so having a resource like this is so critical and so important. And I’m so grateful for the work that you’re doing.

Alexandra Bailey (35:36)
Thank you. And I think that’s absolutely right. And there are also people who are engaged in that behaviour who don’t want to be. So I think there are lots of assumptions about the fact that if people are offending online, that’s clearly something they want to do, and they have no interest in stopping. And actually, our service very much illustrates that that’s not the case.

And there are lots of people that are very unhappy with the behaviour that they’re engaged in, but they don’t know how to stop it by themselves. And therefore, we’re there as a place to help support them with putting what they need to in place to stop the behaviour and ensure it stays stopped.

I think one of the things that makes people anxious about coming forward and seeking help is generally the narrative around this type of behaviour and child sexual abuse. And I think it’s one of the conversations that we kind of have a lot, if you look at the news, if you look at the media, if you look at what’s put forward, what’s put forward is very much around, you know, monsters that are engaging in this type of, this type of behavior.

Now, we understand, and of course, you can understand why people have such a strong reaction to this kind of offending, of course. And as you say, you know, the, victims voices in all of this are incredibly important But there are lots of people who might be offending who don’t identify as a monster with themselves or don’t identify as a paedophile for example and therefore they start thinking well they’re not the kind of person that does need to seek help because they’re not a monster or a paedophile or you will have other people who might be concerned about somebody else, but they’re not a monster and they’re not a paedophile. You know, they have a wife and children so they couldn’t possibly be engaging in any kind of offending behaviour or be any risk to children because of this stereotype of this narrative.

So not only I think does it maybe stop people from seeking help, it also stops other people who might be concerned about someone else seeking help because they then were like, well, that person doesn’t match what’s put out to us all the time in the media. So therefore, they think that it can possibly be a risk issue here.

Whereas, of course, we know that the people who commit these types of offences online come from all walks of life. They are absolutely people’s partners, people’s children, people’s fathers and mothers, and you know, have people in their lives who love them, who don’t see them as a monster because actually their behavior is one part of their life that usually the people around them aren’t seeing.

So it’s important that we put a narrative out there that’s realistic so people recognize themselves
in the narrative of somebody who needs to seek help.

But also, the fact that there are a lot of these things coming forward in the media and things like that now, actually also means we’re talking about this more. And we need to talk about it more. Because it is a behaviour, it is something that people do in secrecy.

So the more and more we talk about it, the more and more we can bring it to the forefront, and we can have that conversation that says, yes, this is going on. We know this is going on. We know that there are people doing this who don’t want to do it, who want to stop. So let’s provide a conversation and an avenue for them to do that.

Fight The New Drug (39:52)
Parents right now who are navigating this landscape with pornography being so accessible, wanting to protect their children, who have no idea what’s actually out there in terms of the technology their children are experiencing, predators are online, ⁓ what feels most important for parents to know and understand in this time right now?

Alexandra Bailey (40:16)
So I think the key to all of this is education. So first of all, parents need to be educating themselves on what’s out there and what their children or young people are doing. I know sometimes that can feel quite challenging because there’s new apps and new things popping up all the time. But as parents, the best thing we can do is be educated on those things because we also need to educate our children.

So we need to be talking to our children early on about going online. We need to be talking to them about the risks that are out there. We need to be talking to them about pornography. We need to be talking to them about staying safe online. We need to be talking to them about what healthy relationships look like.

Because that means that if they do come across pornography online, if they are exposed to it, and we do know that lots of children and young people are, they recognise that that’s not what healthy relationships will be looking like. We want children to understand the risks of giving out personal information. We want them to understand the risks of talking to people online that they don’t know.

So the education side of things is huge.

There are, of course, things that we can do in terms of creating barriers. We talk a lot about parental controls and things like that that are incredibly important. There are monitoring softwares that you can get that you can put on the devices of children so that you can see what they’re doing. But sooner or later, are going to want and young people are going to want more independence in their technology use, which is why the conversations and the education side of things is the most important. And in order for us to educate them, we need to be educated too, so that we know what we’re talking about.

And I mean, Stop It Now website, for example, has some great resources on there around internet safety and helping people to think about those conversations and things that they can do in order to educate children and young people.

Fight The New Drug (42:38)
Amazing, and as you said, you know, even if you have all of the right quote-unquote right safeguards in place there will come a time where your child has to graduate from training wheels and exist in the world without them and or they have friends who have you know no filters and and we have to prepare them to navigate this world where you know there’s so much to to consider right now.

Alexandra Bailey (42:57)
Mm-hmm.

Fight The New Drug (43:03)
I have so many things I would love to pick your brain on and ask you about. And I’m so grateful for the work that you’re doing and have done with the Lucy Faithfull Foundation for 20 years, as you mentioned. This work can be incredibly difficult and incredibly heavy. I just want to ask, as kind of a final thought, what gives you hope as you continue to do this work?

Alexandra Bailey (43:30)
So I think some of the things that give me hope is the partnerships that are being created. We are not singularly trying to deal with this issue. We are creating partnerships. Within the UK we have a lot of partnerships, but also internationally, all over the world, we are all coming together to tackle this issue together, and recognise the different ways in which we can do that.

So, from a kind of individual level, working with people who are concerned about their behaviour and might pose a risk, to a technological level, you know, working with tech companies on disruption and deterrence, working with government on policies and change, so the fact that everybody’s coming together and working together.

I think it’s a very hopeful thing. I think the fact that we are talking about this more, that there are more conversations, some of those conversations are difficult to have, but this is a behaviour, sexual abuse generally, sexual offending against children, has been a behaviour that’s thrived for many, many years on silence and secrecy.

So the fact that we are talking about it, that we are speaking out, and we are,from all sides of that, from recognising everybody within the narrative and the story, I feel, is very hopeful.

And the other thing that gives me hope is our Stop It Now service and the fact that every day we see people contacting us wanting help to prevent child sexual abuse.

So the calls that we get from people who are concerned about themselves to people who are concerned about somebody else, everybody is looking and thinking about prevention and safeguarding. And we are proof that if you give people an avenue to come forward to get help, there are people that will.

So we can prevent this. We can do it. And it’s kind of an illustration of that really, which I think is hopeful.

Fight The New Drug (45:52)
Yeah, and that gives me a lot of hope as we’re entering by the New Drug’s 17th year, and even in the time that we’ve been doing this work, we’ve seen quite an evolution course, technology and the way these things are happening, but also way that we’re able to address this now much more openly than we were 17 years ago with much more reception from individuals. All of the partnerships you’ve mentioned, being able to have these conversations openly, and your resources as well, give me a lot of hope, too, in this work.

I’m so grateful we were able to have this conversation. I’m so grateful for the work that your foundation is doing. We’ll be sure to share resources for our listeners in the show notes. And for any of our listeners, if you would like to continue to hear conversations like this, please like and subscribe. We’ll see you next time on Consider Before Consuming.

Alexandra Bailey (46:47)
Thank you.

Fight The New Drug (46:48)
Thank you so much.