How to build child safety capability without starting from scratch

Many technology companies are thinking seriously about child safety.

The question is rarely whether the issue matters. Companies already understand that online child sexual exploitation and abuse is a serious risk that requires attention.

The harder question is more practical:

That concern is understandable.

For many companies, child safety sits alongside product development, legal and policy obligations, trust and safety operations, user support, regulatory compliance, and business growth. Some companies have dedicated specialists. Many do not. Some are scaling quickly. Others are trying to strengthen their approach with a small team and limited time.

That can make child safety feel overwhelming.

But limited capacity is not a reason to navigate this work alone. In many cases, it is one of the strongest reasons to seek support.

The right support should help teams conserve bandwidth, not stretch them further. It should make it easier to find trusted guidance, learn from others, understand emerging risks, and focus your time where it can be most useful.

Many of the challenges your team may be facing have been faced by others before. There are resources, tools, organizations, and peer communities that can help.

The first step is understanding what child safety capability can involve, where support exists, and how collaboration can help companies avoid building everything from scratch.

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The issue usually isn’t commitment. It’s capacity.

When I speak with companies, I rarely hear people say they do not care about child safety.

What I hear is that teams are trying to answer difficult operational questions:

• What should we prioritize first?
• What do good policies look like?
• What reporting obligations might apply to us?
• What technical tools should we understand?
• How do we assess risk in new products or features?
• How do we support the people doing this work?
• How do we keep up with emerging threats?
• Who can we learn from?

These are not small questions.

They cut across policy, product, engineering, legal, operations, communications, and leadership.

That is why child safety can feel difficult for smaller or growing teams. It is not one task. It is a set of capabilities that develop over time.

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The right support should expand your capacity, not consume it.

One concern companies sometimes have when they encounter an industry initiative is that participation will create another workstream.

• Another standing meeting.
• Another committee.
• Another set of expectations.

That is a fair concern, especially for teams already managing many operational priorities.

But the right network should not become another item on your team’s to-do list. It should help make the list easier to manage.

That means helping teams avoid duplicated effort. For example:

• Instead of researching every emerging issue alone, teams can learn from others already navigating similar challenges.
• Instead of benchmarking in isolation, teams can draw on peer experience.
• Instead of building every policy, process, or resource from scratch, teams can use practical guidance and proven approaches.
• Instead of interpreting new threats alone, teams can benefit from shared intelligence and cross-industry perspectives.

This is one of the reasons industry collaboration matters.

For a small team, the value is not just access to information. It is access to perspective, judgment, and practical experience that would otherwise take much longer to build internally.

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Child safety is broader than content moderation

For many years, online child safety was viewed primarily as a content moderation challenge: identify harmful content, remove it, and take action against offending accounts.

While content moderation remains an essential capability, it is no longer sufficient on its own. Today’s threats require a holistic, cross-functional approach that extends well beyond detecting and removing content. 

Companies must also understand offender behaviors, identify product features that can be exploited, anticipate risks during product development, strengthen governance and operational processes, and design systems that help prevent harm before it occurs. 

Effective child safety is no longer just about responding to abuse. It is about building products, policies, and operations that make abuse more difficult to occur in the first place.

It can involve:

Policies and standards
Clear rules that define prohibited behavior and content, and explain how the company responds.

Safety by design
Assessing how products, features, and user journeys could be misused before harm occurs.

Detection and reporting
Understanding how harmful content or behavior may be surfaced, reviewed, escalated, and, where required, reported to appropriate authorities.

Product and engineering choices
Building systems that reduce risk, support reporting, and help teams respond consistently.

Legal and policy awareness
Keeping up with laws, regulatory expectations, and reporting requirements across jurisdictions.

Transparency and accountability
Explaining policies, processes, and progress in ways that build trust with users, regulators, and other stakeholders.

Team wellbeing
Supporting the people who review, investigate, or respond to distressing material and behavior.

Collaboration
Learning from peers, experts, and organizations that have worked through similar challenges.

No company needs to solve all of this at once. But seeing the full picture can help teams prioritize more clearly.

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Your platform may have a role, even if it was not built for children.

Some companies do not immediately see themselves as part of the child safety ecosystem.

Their platform may not be aimed at children. It may not look like a social network. It may be focused on gaming, messaging, hosting, payments, discovery, file sharing, AI tools, or infrastructure.

But online child sexual exploitation and abuse can involve many different services and technologies.

A perpetrator might use one service to make contact, another to communicate, another to store or share material, and another to move money. In some cases, a platform may only see one part of the activity.

This is why it is useful for companies to ask not only:

Is our platform being used directly for abuse?

but also:

Could our platform play a role in enabling, facilitating, detecting, or disrupting harm?

That question can be uncomfortable. But it is often the right starting point.

It helps teams think beyond obvious risks and consider how their service might fit within a wider digital ecosystem.

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Support exists across the child safety ecosystem

One of the most useful things to understand is that child safety support does not sit in one place.

Different organizations, tools, communities, and frameworks play different roles. Some support reporting. Some help reduce the availability of child sexual abuse material online. Some provide research, policy expertise, frameworks, or victim-support resources. Others help companies learn from peers and strengthen internal capability.

This is not a compliance map, a standard of care, or a directory. It is a starting point for understanding the kinds of support that already exist, and where a company might begin depending on its risks, products, markets, and capacity.

Not every organization, tool, or framework will be relevant to every company. Depending on the product, sector, or market, companies may also need more specialized support — for example in gaming, payments, infrastructure, AI, or regional policy contexts.

The important point is that companies do not need to navigate this ecosystem alone.

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Where the Tech Coalition fits

The Tech Coalition is an industry alliance that helps technology companies strengthen their response to online child sexual exploitation and abuse.

It does not replace reporting bodies, legal advisers, technical tools, civil society organizations, or specialist child protection organizations.

Instead, the Tech Coalition helps companies build on what the industry and wider child safety ecosystem have already learned.

That can include:

• peer learning from other companies;
• working groups focused on shared challenges;
• practical resources and implementation guidance;
• legal and policy updates;
• technical initiatives;
• wellness and team-support guidance;
• opportunities to collaborate on emerging threats;
• connections to relevant organizations and expertise where appropriate;
• a trusted community of people working on similar issues.

The goal is not to pull teams away from operational priorities. It is to help them make faster, better-informed decisions and avoid navigating complex child safety challenges in isolation.

For teams with limited resources, that can matter.

Instead of spending time searching for guidance, benchmarking alone, or interpreting emerging threats independently, members can draw on a trusted network.

For companies that are just beginning to build capability, Pathways may be a useful starting point. It is designed to help platforms strengthen their child safety foundations and access practical resources.

For companies ready for deeper engagement, the Tech Coalition membership provides access to a wider community of peers, working groups, resources, and collaborative initiatives.

The underlying idea is simple:

Companies can improve faster together than they can alone.

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Participation can be flexible

Membership does not need to be all-or-nothing.

Companies do not need to participate in every working group, attend every event, or engage in every initiative to receive value.

Some members participate deeply in specific areas. Others engage selectively based on their priorities, maturity, and available capacity. Some use the Tech Coalition as a practical support system they can draw on when they need trusted guidance, peer expertise, or perspective on a particular issue.

Participation can evolve over time as a company’s needs change.

That flexibility matters because child safety teams are often under pressure. Tech Coalition membership is designed to meet companies where they are, not create unnecessary pressure for teams already doing difficult work.

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You don’t have to reinvent this alone

Building child safety capability is a journey.

Some companies are just beginning. Others have mature teams and systems. Most are still learning, because the challenge keeps evolving.

The companies that benefit most from collaboration are not always the ones with the largest Trust & Safety teams. Often, they are the ones that recognize they do not have time to reinvent solutions others have already worked through.

The Tech Coalition is designed to help teams use their limited time well: by connecting them to trusted resources, peer expertise, and practical collaboration.

If full membership feels premature, Pathways may be a useful first step. If membership feels relevant now, we can help you understand what practical, capacity-conscious participation could look like for your team.

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We’re here to talk

If this has surfaced a question your team does not yet have a clear answer to, that is useful. These are conversations we have often.

Wherever your organization is on its child safety journey, you do not have to navigate it alone.

The Tech Coalition is not here to audit your platform or tell you what to build. But if a conversation about how we can expand your bandwidth is useful, I would be glad to have it.

Please reach out directly with the link below or explore the Pathways program.

Contact Katia

Fill in the inquiry form and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible

Get in touch

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A few questions I often hear

Once teams understand the wider child safety landscape, the questions usually become practical. What should we do first? Who needs to be involved? How much time will this take? And where does the Tech Coalition actually fit?