When a child is in the footage, the job changes category. It is no longer a reputation problem with a sensitive image attached. It is a child-protection and criminal-reporting problem that happens to have a URL. Adults around the child lose a day when they treat it as an ordinary image-and-safety takedown, or worse, when they forward the file so that other adults can “keep an eye out”.
If you remember one instruction from this guide, make it this one: do not circulate the file to help. Do not drop it in a staff chat. Do not email it to a journalist. Do not upload it to this desk. Do not post a warning that includes the image “so people know what to look for”. Australian criminal law is unfriendly to people who move child sexual abuse material, even with a story about good intentions. Report the location. Leave the file where it is until a platform, eSafety or police take it.
This piece does not describe the content. It does not name children. It maps the order of the doors.
The order that actually matters
Speed beats a tidy paper trail. The useful order, for an Australian adult who has found a URL, is:
- If a child is in immediate physical danger, call the police. A URL is not a reason to skip triple zero when the threat is at a house or a school gate.
- Report the URL on the platform’s child-sexual-abuse or child-exploitation flow, not the ordinary bullying button and not the adult intimate-image button. Those queues route to different teams and, on the large services, to the US clearing house that platforms are required to use.
- Report to eSafety under the child scheme that fits — child sexual exploitation and abuse material, or the children’s cyberbullying scheme if the harm is peer-on-peer abuse rather than sexual material. The statutory overlay is in what eSafety can actually order.
- Report to police or through ACORN so there is an Australian criminal record of the URL, the account and the time you found it.
- Only then think about Search, mirrors, schools and civil lawyers.
Adult NCII platform tools are the wrong lead if a child is depicted. They can be a later, parallel filing if the same account is also hosting adult material. They are not the priority pathway.
What you capture, and what you do not
You need enough to show a reviewer the URL without becoming a distributor.
Capture the address bar, the account name, the timestamp and the fact of the post. A cropped screenshot that does not reproduce the harmful region is enough for most platform and eSafety forms. If you cannot crop without keeping the harmful region, skip the screenshot and take the URL, the time, and a written note of where you found it.
Do not download “a clean copy for evidence” onto a shared drive. Do not ask a colleague to store a spare. Police and the statutory bodies have their own collection methods. Your job is to point, not to archive a library.
Do not name the child on a public report form if the form does not require it. Do not name the child in a tweet about the process. This journal will not publish those names, and you should not create a second index of them.
eSafety’s child schemes
eSafety is the Australian administrative door that can require a service to remove certain child cyber-abuse and child sexual exploitation material. It is not a substitute for police. It is often the fastest way to put a notice on an offshore platform that has ignored an ordinary user report.
Use the scheme that matches the facts:
Child sexual exploitation and abuse material. If the footage is sexual and a child is depicted, this is the scheme. You will be asked for the URL, the service, and how you came to see it. You will not be asked to attach the file as a matter of course. Do not volunteer it.
Cyberbullying of a child. If the harm is a campaign of abuse or non-sexual imagery used to attack a particular child, the children’s cyberbullying scheme is the one eSafety built for serious online abuse of a person under 18. It still needs a URL and a clear account of the harm.
eSafety can work with the platform and, where the tests are met, issue a removal notice. It can also tell you that the material is a police matter and that you should not be handling it. Believe that instruction. If a child is in the frame, say so at the first screen and let triage put the file in the child queue.
ACORN and police
ACORN, the Australian Cybercrime Online Reporting Network, is the online form that creates a record when the local station is not sure what to do with a URL. Use it. Take the reference number. If the child is in your care and the account is local — a student, a former partner, a known adult — also speak to the station or the specialist unit the state police nominate for online child abuse. The form and the conversation are not duplicates; one creates a national record, the other can produce an investigator.
Police will not, as a rule, de-index Google for you. They will, sometimes, send a legal packet to a platform that has stalled, and they will treat possession and transmission as the crimes they are. That is the point of this door. It is not a reputation desk.
If the person reporting is a mandated reporter in a school or a service, follow that organisation’s child-protection procedure as well as the platform and eSafety reports. An internal incident form that never names the URL is an incomplete report. An email thread that attaches the footage is a mistake.
Platform child-sexual-abuse reports
The large platforms keep a child-sexual-abuse-material report that is legally and operationally distinct from their adult intimate-image tools. On Meta, TikTok, YouTube, Snap, X and several games, that button is the one that creates a report they can send to the clearing house they use for this material. The adult “nudity” button does not always do that.
You do not need an account on every service, but you do need the URL. Report as a person who has encountered the material, not as a vigilante who has been collecting examples. Do not join a “hunting” group that swaps links. Those groups become distributors with a slogan.
If the platform asks whether the person depicted is under 18, and you know that they are, say so. If you are not sure, say you are not sure. Guessing a younger age to “make it go faster” is how reports get bounced when the reviewer disagrees.
A confirmation email is not a finding that the child is safe. Recheck the URL. If it is still live after a short interval, file eSafety and ACORN if you have not already. Do not refresh the page in a staff room so other adults can see that it is “still up”.
After the first reports
Once the priority doors are used, the leftovers look like other stories on this desk: a Google Images card, a forum scrape, a news article that should not have used a frame. Those jobs come second. Use Google Search removal only for the cards that remain after the host report, and do not attach the footage to the Google form.
Schools, clubs and employers will want a briefing. Give them the URLs you reported, the reference numbers, and the instruction not to circulate the file. Do not give them a zip.
A solicitor can still matter later: a publisher, a civil claim, a suppression question. That is not hour two. Nothing here is legal advice. It is an order of operations so the first day is not spent on a reputation proposal.
A working sequence we recommend
- If a child is in physical danger, call the police.
- Capture the URL and, if you can do it without reproducing the harm, a cropped screenshot. Do not download a library. Do not circulate the file.
- Report the URL on the platform’s child-sexual-abuse or child-exploitation flow.
- Report to eSafety under the child scheme that fits.
- Report to police or ACORN. Keep the reference number.
- Tell the school or service only what it needs to protect the child, without sending the footage.
- After the file is off the first host, deal with Search and mirrors as leftovers, not as the lead.
If you want the desk to look at a general question about the process, use contact. Do not send the footage, the child’s name, or a cloud folder of copies. We publish method. We do not run your case.