The Athena Programme

BREAKING: UK sets deadline for tech firms on child online safety

The UK government has given tech companies three months to introduce controls preventing children from sending, receiving, or viewing explicit images , with legislation expected if they fail to act.

This reflects a growing safeguarding challenge:
Online harm is increasingly peer-to-peer and self-generated
Exposure is happening at younger ages, often via personal devices
Risks are evolving faster than traditional protective measures
For safeguarding professionals, this reinforces a key point, technology alone cannot solve this issue.

At Athena, we see the importance of combining controls with education, awareness, and early intervention. Supporting children, parents, and organisations to understand risk and build safer behaviours remains critical.

We will continue to monitor how this develops and what it means in practice for safeguarding across sectors