When a child tells you what they saw online, you have about ten seconds. Would you know what to do with them?
An essentials course for teachers, safeguarding leads, social workers, police and therapists — and the scripts, checklists and policy addendum you take away and keep.
Under 90 minutes. From Dr Catherine Knibbs, the psychotherapist who developed Cybertrauma™ theory.
Get instant access — £39Your safeguarding training covered the paperwork. It didn't cover the moment: the Year 4 child describing a gory video, the 14-year-old being sextorted who's told nobody, the parent demanding you “make TikTok delete it.”
Legislation doesn't give you those tools either. It tells you what to report — not what to say.
And children rarely come out and say it. They hint, they suggest, they go quiet, they ask an odd question at the wrong moment. So you improvise. And most people improvise the same three things: What exactly did you see? Why were you watching that? Or perhaps, “It's not real, it's just a game.” All three are reasonable. All three teach a child that you are not the person to tell.
This isn't a gap in you. It's a gap in what anyone ever taught you.
Why nobody taught you this
Because almost nobody has studied it. Dr Catherine Knibbs' doctoral research followed children aged 7–10 who had seen violence and gore online. Across a cohort of 16 children, 10 showed responses matching post-traumatic stress criteria in the DSM-5 — the same family of responses we classify in soldiers and front-line workers.
Much of what affected them sat below the Online Safety Act's “priority content” threshold. Which means the law doesn't catch it, the guidance doesn't name it, and no training was ever built for it. Your policy probably doesn't mention it. Your recording system has no obvious place to put it.
It is the only research of its kind in the world. This course is where it becomes something you can use on Monday morning.
The 90 minutes
Five short modules — what cybertrauma is and isn't, how it presents in the room, the first ten seconds, the interventions that backfire, and your next step as a practitioner.
What you keep
The Cybertrauma Safeguarding Toolkit — four documents, as downloadable PDFs:
- The scripts — what to say to a child, to a parent, and to your DSL or SLT
- The checklists — signs worth being curious about, what to do in the moment, referral and escalation, and one for looking after yourself
- The procedures — recognise, respond, record, refer, review
- An adoptable policy addendum — a drop-in Online Harm & Cybertrauma template, in an organisation version and a self-employed practitioner version, licensed to you for one year to adapt for internal safeguarding use
Plus a CPD certificate of completion and lifetime access, including updates.
The toolkit is released after you have worked through the modules. That's deliberate — a script you haven't understood is a method that fails in the room.
Who it's for
Anyone whose job now includes a child's digital life — whether or not they asked for it.
Teachers and TAs · safeguarding leads and DSLs · social workers · school nurses · youth workers · police · therapists and counsellors.
Especially if a child has already told you something you felt unprepared for. Most people have. Very few say so.
The honest bit
The checklists are deliberately not exhaustive, and I say so on camera. You need enough to notice something, enough not to make it worse, and an accurate sense of where your own training stops. A checklist that pretends to be complete is exactly the one that falls apart when a real child is in front of you.
Not for whole-team or organisation-wide training — that's a different conversation: [email protected]
About your tutor
Dr Catherine Knibbs (PhD) — Consultant Child & Adult Trauma Psychotherapist, Online Harms Consultant, developer of Cybertrauma™ theory, author of seven books, TEDx speaker, and journal editor at Frontiers (Cybersecurity in Digital Mental Health). Her doctoral research on children aged 7–10 exposed to violence and gore online is the only work of its kind in the world.
MIWIC Top 20 2026 · National Cyber Awards 2025 · Tech Women 50
She handles the difficult topics — pornography, grooming, violence, gore — without embarrassment, and the point of the training is that you can too.
£39 · instant access · workplace invoicing available
If it doesn't change how you'd respond when a child tells you something, email within 14 days explaining why it hasn't worked for you and where I have communicated poorly, for a full refund.
Questions
Is this CPD? Yes — a certificate of completion is included.
How long do I have access? Lifetime, including any updates.
What do I actually get to keep? Four documents, as downloadable PDFs: the scripts, the checklists, the procedures, and an adoptable policy addendum — the addendum in both an organisation version and a self-employed practitioner version.
When do I get them? They are released after you have worked through the modules, and they're yours to keep. The words only work when you know why they're worded that way.
Can I adapt the policy addendum? Yes. It's a template with bracketed fields, licensed to you for one year to adapt for internal safeguarding use.
Is this the same as the Certificate Course? No — this is the essentials. The Certificate is the full 10-month professional training, and Essentials buyers get a £39 credit toward it.
I've done safeguarding training already. So has almost everyone who takes this. Safeguarding training was built for the harms we could already name. This one isn't in the legislation, because it has been overlooked — and yet it is one of the biggest harms our children face with online content.
