We’ve just published our 2020/21 annual report, which includes highlights from the past year and outlines our future plans. Since 1992, we have worked to prevent child sexual abuse by helping the public and professionals play their part in keeping children safe online and offline. Learn more.

We are proud to announce that our #GetHelpOrGetCaught campaign in collaboration with Police Scotland won ‘Campaign of the Year’ at the 2021 Scottish Charity Awards. The campaign aimed to prevent adults grooming children online, providing access to anonymous self-help support to stop further harm.

We interviewed record-breaker Rhys Jenkins after his monumental challenge of running from John O’Groats to Land’s End, whilst also summiting the three highest peaks in the UK, to help raise fund for our work.

One thing you can do to help keep children safe is to talk to your child about sex and relationships in a way that’s appropriate for their age. This includes talking to them about what they do online, and assuring them that they can talk to you about anything that happens that worries or upsets them.

Stop It Now! UK and Ireland has expanded to help keep more children safe with our new Stop It Now! Ireland project. The launch saw child protection professionals from Ireland coming together to help prevent child sexual abuse with the new confidential helpline and tailored Ireland webpages.

Our principal practitioner discusses the impact of porn on child sexual abuse and children’s understanding of sex and relationships. New research suggests that the majority of teens aged 16-17 have recently seen pornography online, sparking calls by parents and campaigners for the government to introduce age verification for users of porn sites.

Reports of sexual abuse, harassment, and assault have been in the headlines after a website was set up for schoolchildren to post about their experiences, with much abuse taking place in schools. The statistics will be a surprise to lots of people, but it does mean that there’s lots we can all do to prevent this harm from happening in the first place.

The brave and public disclosure of historic abuse by a professional football player led to hundreds of other complaints by players in the professional and amateur game. There is lots we can take away from this disclosure to help keep children safe from abuse in sport and other clubs, with better disclosure schemes, educating children on what is acceptable behaviour and ensuring adults know how to spot the signs of abuse.

Despite the pandemic, the Stop It Now! helpline had its busiest year ever in 2020, handling more than 12,500 contacts – up from 10,700 in 2019. We have mainly had calls from people concerned about their own or someone else’s online behaviour, and our encouraging those in a similar situation to call and get anonymous support.

We want to make our supporters aware of a data breach involving one of our data providers, Blackbaud, which may have involved personal information of our supporters. The Lucy Faithfull Foundation uses Blackbaud’s Raisers Edge software to help us manage our donor database and supporter communication systems.