This is part three of Protecting Our Children. Part one set out the threat and the reporting routes. Part two described how contact starts and why children do not tell you. This part is the one to read before you need it.

It will not arrive at a convenient time. It arrives at eleven at night, or in the car, or through a bedroom door that has been shut for two hours. It will not arrive in a clear sentence either. You are more likely to get "I've done something stupid" or "I need help and you're going to be angry" than anything resembling a description of what has happened.

What follows is the hour after that. I have written it as an order of operations, because under that much adrenaline nobody invents a good sequence from first principles. Read it now, while nothing is wrong, and it will be there when it is.

One framing point before the steps. The demand in front of you feels like the emergency. It is not. The image is a problem with a process attached to it, and the process works. The actual emergency is a child who currently believes their life is over, and the whole of the next hour should be arranged around that.

The first ninety seconds

Before any of the practical work, three things need to happen, and they take about a minute and a half.

Get your face under control. Whatever is happening internally, what your child needs to see is an adult who is not frightened. They have spent hours, possibly days, predicting your reaction. Every second that the prediction turns out to be wrong is a second the offender's leverage decays.

Then say the two sentences. Some version of: you are not in trouble, and this is not your fault. Then: I know exactly what this is, it happens to thousands of people, and there are people whose actual job is to fix it. Both halves matter. The first removes the punishment they were braced for. The second removes the isolation, which is doing more work than the threat itself.

Then sit down next to them, physically, with the phone still in their hands. Not opposite them. Next to them. You are about to go through a series of steps together and the posture of the next hour should be joint, not investigative.

Do not pay

This is the one instruction that is close to absolute, and it is worth understanding why rather than just complying with it.

Paying does not buy silence. It confirms three things to the offender: that the account is live, that the person behind it is frightened, and that this particular victim pays. In financially motivated sextortion — which, per the NCA's campaign data, is overwhelmingly what a British family will meet — the operation is a business run at volume by organised groups, mostly overseas. A paying victim is not released. They are re-priced.

Do not pay in gift cards, cryptocurrency, a bank transfer, a gaming top-up, or anything else. Do not let the child pay from their own account to keep you out of it, which is a common instinct and a common mistake.

If money has already gone, stop reading this paragraph as a criticism. Enormous numbers of adults have paid in the same position, and the child who paid was doing the only thing they could see. Stop any further payment, tell the bank, keep every receipt and reference, and include it in the report. It changes nothing about what happens next except that there is now more evidence.

The order to do things in

Sequence matters here more than speed, and the most common expensive mistake is doing the right things in the wrong order — specifically, blocking or deleting before capturing anything.

Do not delete anything at any point in this list. Not the conversation, not the account, not the images, not the app. A deleted conversation is an investigation that goes nowhere, and it also removes the only record the child has that they were the one being done to.

What Report Remove actually does

This is the part I most often find parents have never heard of, and it is the single most reassuring thing in the whole process.

Report Remove is run jointly by Childline and the Internet Watch Foundation, for under-18s in the UK. The child submits the image themselves. IWF analysts assess it, work to have it removed from wherever it appears, and — this is the important bit — create a digital hash of it, a mathematical fingerprint that is shared with platforms so that the same image can be blocked automatically if anyone attempts to upload it again. It can be blocked pre-emptively, before the threat is ever carried out.

Confirming age with ID through Yoti is optional from 13 upwards but worth doing, because it gives the service more legal room to act. Yoti passes nothing to Childline except whether the person is over or under 18. The child gets updates in their Childline locker, and in most cases nobody in their life ever knows the report was made.

Say that out loud to the child, in those terms. The threat they are being held with is "everyone will see this." The honest answer is that there is a mechanism designed specifically to stop that, it is free, it works, and they can start it in the next ten minutes.

Being told, at their lowest, that the thing being used against them can be taken away is frequently the moment the panic breaks.

They have not committed a crime, and it is worth proving it

A large proportion of children in this position are silent because they believe they are the ones in trouble for having sent an image.

The College of Policing guidance covers exactly this. Where a young person has taken or shared an image and there is no exploitation or aggravating factor, forces in England and Wales record it using an outcome code that exists precisely so that no formal criminal justice action follows. The guidance is explicit that the young person has not been convicted or cautioned, and that it is unlikely to be disclosed on a future enhanced DBS check. In a sextortion case the child is the victim of a serious offence, not a suspect in one.

Children do not know any of this, and it is worth saying it in plain terms rather than leaving it as a general reassurance. The NSPCC's own guidance puts it simply: if an incident like this is reported to the police, it is very unlikely to result in the child being prosecuted.

The thing that is actually urgent

I have kept this section short deliberately, and it is the most important one in the article.

Sexual extortion of teenagers has been linked to the deaths of young people in the UK and elsewhere. That is why the tone of the first hour matters more than the technical steps, and why the technical steps are worth knowing in advance — so that your attention can be on your child rather than on working out what to do.

Practically: do not leave them alone with the phone and the panic. Stay in the room. Keep the night unremarkable — food, a blanket, the television on, someone else in the house awake. Deal with the reporting together rather than taking the phone away to handle it privately, because handling it privately looks exactly like the thing being taken out of their hands.

If they are distressed in a way that frightens you, do not try to assess it yourself. Childline is 0800 1111 and is free, confidential and open at any hour. Samaritans are on 116 123. If you believe there is immediate risk, that is 999, and it is a reasonable call to make.

And say the sentence that they will need in the morning as much as tonight: this ends, other people have been exactly here, and it stops being the biggest thing in your life a great deal sooner than it feels like it will.

If it is not about money

Everything above assumes financially motivated extortion, which is the common case. The com-network pattern from part one is different in ways that change the response.

The demand there is not money, it is escalation — more material, self-harm, harming a sibling or a pet, coercing another child. If what your child describes is that shape, treat it as urgent rather than procedural. Report to CEOP immediately, and to 999 if there is any self-harm involved or any threat to another person in the house. Do not wait to gather perfect evidence; capture what you can quickly and report.

Two further things. The child may have been made to do things to other people, and they will be carrying that as guilt rather than as victimhood. They are still a victim, and the professionals who deal with this understand that completely. And there may be more than one offender, in a group, watching. Blocking one account does not end it, which is another reason this route goes to CEOP rather than to the platform's report button alone.

What happens over the following week

The demands usually continue for a while after contact stops, then taper. New accounts will appear. In the great majority of financially motivated cases the threatened distribution never happens, because carrying it out costs the offender the leverage and gains them nothing — though I will not pretend that is a guarantee, and it is not the reason to refuse to pay. The reason to refuse to pay is that paying is what keeps you on the list.

Expect the platform reports to move at different speeds and expect at least one of them to go nowhere. If a platform refuses to act, Report Harmful Content will escalate it on your behalf.

And do not, in the calmer light of the following week, quietly do the thing you did not do on the night. Do not take the phone. You will be tempted, because the device is where it happened and removing it feels like doing something. It is the one action that teaches every other child in the house, and this one, that disclosure costs you everything you have. You spent the first ninety seconds proving the opposite. Do not spend it back.

Next in the series: images — self-generated, leaked and now AI-made — what removal genuinely achieves, what it does not, and how to think about material that can be regenerated faster than it can be taken down.