Former minister calls for phone tech to block live-streamed child sex abuse

Former safeguarding minister Jess Phillips has joined calls from campaigners for the government to back new technology that blocks the live-streaming of child sexual abuse.

The UK National Crime Agency has flagged the UK as the third biggest market in the world for live-streamed abuse, where children are sexually abused live on camera to order.

Device-level blockers can prevent this material being filmed and viewed on smartphones, laptops and tablets in the first place, Phillips said, at the launch of a policy report in Parliament.

Anti-abuse campaigners claim keeping the technology at device level maintains privacy and encryption. Civil liberties campaigners Big Brother Watch dispute this.

The government has already legislated to demand tech firms like Apple and Google, which develop the operating systems of most smartphones used in the UK, block under-18s from taking or sharing nude images on smartphones and other devices.

However, three-quarters of child sexual abuse material (CSA) was not self-generated but likely captured on adult devices, according to 2025 research from the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which works to eliminate child sexual abuse imagery online.

Some 1.8 million men in the UK admitted to some form of online sexual offending against children, according to research from child safety institute Childlight.

Phillips, who complained of repeated delays to work to tackle CSA when she resigned as safeguarding minister in May, is demanding action to tackle the source of the crime and reduce the number of British offenders.

"This should be a source of national shame, and we must stop it," the Labour MP said.

"The technology, the evidence and the public support are all there - I want to work with ministers to extend on-device blocking to child sexual abuse material on every device sold in Britain, making children here and over the world safer."

The software uses AI to classify known child abuse images in the phone's operating system, and blocks the material at the moment it is viewed or created, whatever app is in use.

Nothing is logged, stored or sent anywhere, and the tech would work alongside encryption.

The AI classifier has been trained against a database of known child abuse images so it can differentiate between harmless material such as children at the beach, and sexual abuse.

Phillips said online child sexual abuse is "an issue that we did not keep control of" as legislators and now must be prioritised, at the event in Parliament.

She was joined by survivors of online child sexual abuse, who said they should not have to beg for the removal of images of themselves being abused from the internet.

Phil Eccles, from the National Crime Agency (NCA), said the scale of the problem was "at crisis point".

"This would cut off at source somebody on the UK their ability to direct a live stream for a child to be abused," he said.

"To me, safeguarding children will always supersede the ability to prosecute. If we can stop that abuse we must.

"But it's so important that tech companies come onboard - we cannot arrest our way out of this problem."