Men's violence, not stigma, is the cause of harm to prostituted women

We were pleased to make a submission to the Department of Social Services' September 2021 National Summit on Women's Safety.

Submission on eSafety's Restricted Access System

We were pleased to make a submission on eSafety's Restricted Access System to limit the exposure of children and young people to harmful online content.

We recommend selection of the strongest form of proof-of-age protections to be resistant to any efforts by vested interests to undermine its operations and to protect as many children as possible from demonstrable harm.

Sub calls for increased sentencing, age verification and state laws against child sex abuse dolls 

In our submission on Law Enforcement Capabilities in Relation to child exploitation we highlighted our decade of work to combat child sexual exploitation. We informed the Committee on a range of related topics including Live Distant Child Abuse, sexting, self-generated child sexual abuse material, weak sentencing for perpetrators of child exploitation crimes, and the need for a fast-tracked age verification system to help protect children from exposure to pornography.

Final report acknowledges role of violent porn in VAWG, need for age verification

We were pleased to make a submission to the European Commission's public consultation on Child sexual abuse online - detection, removal and reporting.

Collective Shout welcomed the opportunity to provide a brief to assist Canada's House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in its examination of the conduct of MindGeek - Pornhub's parent company - including allegations of facilitating and distributing Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), non-consensual sexual activity, non-consensually shared images (image-based abuse or IBA) and content created using victims of sex trafficking.

We welcome the draft Online Safety Bill with its new measures dealing with cyber-bullying and cyber-abuse, and proposed industry regulation which, if successfully implemented, will make Australia a world leader in online safety legislation. We were pleased to see that many of our concerns were incorporated into this draft.

However, there are several important omissions that we would like to see addressed in this bill.

Update: UN adopts General Comment on children's online rights (February 11, 2021)

The United Nations now recognises that children’s rights extend to the online realm. These rights - and the responsibilities they invoke on world governments and corporates regarding issues such as children’s online safety - are outlined in the Committee on the Rights of the Child's General Comment 25.