Ms Ana Niculescu:

On what parents can do, communication and education are important. That might sound like a cliché but education plays a crucial role in instigating behavioural change such as this. As a society, we should be able to talk about the risks. I do not know if the Irish curriculum currently covers sexual education. I am not talking about the mechanics of it but the emotional and psychological aspects. We sometimes tend to put the cart before the horse and struggle to make sure children have the digital skills to use technology while not ensuring they have the maturity and knowledge to know how to deal with their emotions and to understand the consequences of their actions online. Parents and possibly schools could have a role in providing better education to kids.

On what governments could do, many countries still do not have legislation to cover child sexual abuse. That is a barrier in our work as well. Irish legislation is very precise, which helps a lot with our work. The words are quite descriptive and the actions are described in legislation, so we think we are ahead of many other EU member states.

With regard to the dark web, we thought that more content would move onto the dark web. The reality is that the majority of content we see is on the open Internet. The problem is that it is across platforms. The assessment process has become more convoluted. One starts on a forum and then finds a reference to a website on the public Internet. One has to go through a couple of steps and sometimes it might involve downloading the content from a cyber locker. I have even seen QR codes used. By scanning the QR code, one receives a link and then in a forum one has a password that provides access to the content on that link. Just documenting that process-----