Not an Impasse - Child Safety, Privacy, and Healing Together

Explore the complex intersection of child safety, digital privacy, and policy-making in this 45-minute conference talk from the 39th Chaos Communication Congress. Examine how current legislative approaches like the EU's "Chat Control" and UK's age verification systems create a false dichotomy between protecting children and preserving adult privacy. Understand why the traditional impasse framing of child sexual abuse (CSA) prevention limits effective solutions and constrains meaningful engagement with the complexity of abuse cycles. Learn about the shortcomings of policing-driven technological solutions such as client-side scanning and grooming classifiers, and discover why detection and criminalization approaches fail to address root causes. Gain insights from scientific and clinical research combined with transformative justice approaches to understand what CSA actually is, how it occurs both offline and online, and why current prevention methods are inadequate. Discover principled alternatives that move beyond criminalization toward collective interventions that protect both safety and privacy for all those affected by CSA. Understand the unique and important role technologists can play in developing humane, effective solutions that break cycles of abuse while maintaining fundamental digital rights and freedoms.