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First codes of practice and guidance published, on new duties for tech firms under the UK’s Online Safety Act

Source: Ofcom published on this site Wednesday 18 December 2024 by Jill Powell

Ofcom has, four months ahead of the statutory deadline^,published its first-edition codes of practice and guidance on tackling illegal harms – such as terror, hate, fraud, child sexual abuse and assisting or encouraging suicide^[ – under the UK’s Online Safety Act.

The Act places new safety duties on social media firms, search engines, messaging, gaming and dating apps, and pornography and file-sharing sites. Before they can enforce these duties, they are required to produce codes of practice and industry guidance to help firms to comply, following a period of public consultation.

Ofcom have consulted carefully and widely to inform their final decisions, listening to civil society, charities and campaigners, parents and children, the tech industry, and expert bodies and law enforcement agencies, with over 200 responses submitted to their consultation.

As an evidence-based regulator, every response has been carefully considered, alongside cutting-edge research and analysis, and we have strengthened some areas of the codes since our initial consultation. The result is a set of measures – many of which are not currently being used by the largest and riskiest platforms – that will significantly improve safety for all users, especially children.

What regulation will deliver

The illegal harms codes and guidance markshttps://www.ofcom.org.uk/ a major milestone in creating a safer life online, firing the starting gun on the first set of duties for tech companies. Every site and app in scope of the new laws has from today until 16 March 2025 to complete an assessment to understand the risks illegal content poses to children and adults on their platform.

Subject to the codes completing the Parliamentary process by this date, from 17 March 2025, sites and apps will then need to start implementing safety measures to mitigate those risks, and the codes set out measures they can take.[4] Some of these measures apply to all sites and apps, and others to larger or riskier platforms. The most important changes Ofcom expect the codes and guidance to deliver include:

Senior accountability for safety. To ensure strict accountability, each provider should name a senior person accountable to their most senior governance body for compliance with their illegal content, reporting and complaints duties.
Better moderation, easier reporting and built-in safety tests. Tech firms will need to make sure their moderation teams are appropriately resourced and trained and are set robust performance targets, so they can remove illegal material quickly when they become aware of it, such as illegal suicide content. Reporting and complaints functions will be easier to find and use, with appropriate action taken in response. Relevant providers will also need to improve the testing of their algorithms to make illegal content harder to disseminate.
Protecting children from sexual abuse and exploitation online. While developing the codes and guidance, Ofcom heard from thousands of children and parents about their online experiences, as well as professionals who work with them. New research, published today, also highlights children’s experiences of sexualised messages online^[4], as well as teenage children’s views on our proposed safety measures aimed at preventing adult predators from grooming and sexually abusing children.^[5] Many young people we spoke to felt interactions with strangers, including adults or users perceived to be adults, are currently an inevitable part of being online, and they described becoming ‘desensitised’ to receiving sexualised messages.

Taking these unique insights into account, our final measures are explicitly designed to tackle pathways to online grooming. This will mean that, by default, on platforms where users connect with each other, children’s profiles and locations – as well as friends and connections – should not be visible to other users, and non-connected accounts should not be able to send them direct messages. Children should also receive information to help them make informed decisions around the risks of sharing personal information, and they should not appear in lists of people users might wish to add to their network.

Make sure you have a #FraudFreeXmas: Action Fraud reveal 12 fraud types to look out for this Christmas

Source: Action Fraud published on this website Tuesday 10 December 2024 by Jill Powell

People celebrating this festive season are being encouraged to have a #FraudFreeXmas and stay alert to fraudsters taking advantage of the time of year, as Action Fraud reveal the 12 frauds of Christmas.

Make sure you have a #FraudFreeXmas: Action Fraud reveal 12 fraud types to look out for this Christmas

National review into child sexual abuse within the family environment

Source: Child Safeguarding Review Panel published on this site Wednesday 27 November 2024

The national review analysed 136 serious child safeguarding incidents, and 41 related serious case reviews (SCRs) and local child safeguarding practice reviews (LCSPRs).

It explores the specific challenges which feature in the identification, assessment, and response to child sexual abuse within the family environment.

It sets out recommendations and findings for national government and local safeguarding partners to protect children at risk.

The National Review Report “I wanted them all to notice”

The terms of reference for the review are available.

Self-healing practitioner jailed for gross negligence manslaughter after death of diabetic woman

Source: Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) published on this website Monday 9 December 2024 by Jill Powell

A man convicted of gross negligence manslaughter following the death of a 71-year-old diabetic woman at a ‘slapping therapy’ workshop has been jailed.

Hongchi Xiao, 61, from California, USA, had promoted the practice as a ‘cure’ for diabetes at the workshop in Seend, Wiltshire in 2016.

Danielle Carr-Gomm, who had Type 1 diabetes, died on 20 October, 2016 from diabetic ketoacidosis after she stopped taking her insulin at the event.

Xiao led the workshop and assured Mrs Carr-Gomm that her condition could be healed by a method of self-healing known as Paida Lajin, which is said to expel ‘poisonous waste’ from the body through slapping and stretching.

Mrs Carr-Gomm was congratulated by Xiao when she announced on the first day of the workshop that she had stopped taking her insulin.

But she became very unwell after she stopped her injections and Xiao neither told her to start taking her insulin or sought any medical assistance despite assuming a position of leadership over her care.

Her death was as a direct result of not taking her insulin injections at the slapping therapy workshop.

On 6 December at Winchester Crown Court, Xiao was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment, with a five-year extended licence period.

Rosemary Ainslie, Head of the CPS Special Crime Division, said:

“Hongchi Xiao knew the consequences of Danielle Carr-Gomm’s decision to stop taking insulin could be fatal - he had seen it before. The prosecution successfully applied for bad character evidence to be made admissible, so that members of the jury could hear about Xiao’s previous conviction in Australia which arose from strikingly similar circumstances and followed the death of a child also deprived of insulin.

“Xiao openly criticised the use of insulin and congratulated Mrs Carr-Gomm on her decision to stop using it at the workshop she was attending in Wiltshire. Once she became extremely unwell, as a result of not taking her medication, he took no action to seek medical assistance or persuade her to take her insulin.

“Hongchi Xiao was the man in charge, yet he failed to respond to Mrs Carr-Gomm’s worsening condition with tragic consequences . His failure to take reasonable steps to help Mrs Carr-Gomm substantially contributed to her death and amounted to gross negligence.

“The CPS will always seek to deliver justice and our thoughts remain with the family of Mrs Carr-Gomm at this time.”

Building the case; Gross negligence manslaughter

The offence of gross negligence manslaughter is committed where the death is a result of a grossly negligent act or omission on the part of the defendant.

In order to prove the offence, the prosecution must therefore establish the following elements:

The defendant owed a duty of care to the deceased;
•    The defendant was in breach of the duty which he owed to the deceased;
•    The breach of duty was a cause of the death; and
•    The causative breach of duty amounts to gross negligence manslaughter and is therefore a crime.

In this case, prosecutors looked at three key areas:

1.    Knowledge – Xiao knew that Mrs Carr-Gomm was a Type 1 diabetic and that she was relying on Paida Lajin having claimed to have reduced her insulin intake by 50 per cent.
2.    Previous experience – Xiao’s previous experience with Mrs Carr-Gomm at a workshop in Bulgaria demonstrated that she would become seriously ill very quickly without insulin and that beginning her injections again would reverse that decline. Xiao also knew that Mrs Carr-Gomm would listen to his advice to start taking insulin again.
3.    Death of Aidan – Xiao knew of the fatal consequences of the failure to take insulin in the case of another boy who died the year before. That incident is clear evidence of knowledge of an obvious risk of death from a failure to take insulin.

Mrs Carr-Gomm first met Xiao at a Paida Lajin workshop in Bulgaria in July 2016 as she sought an alternative to insulin injections which she disliked.

At that workshop, Mrs Carr-Gomm also stopped her insulin injections but was persuaded to start taking her medication again after she became extremely unwell.

During the trial, prosecutors argued that Xiao was well aware of the impact on Mrs Carr-Gomm of not taking her insulin due to the workshop in Bulgaria, and that he had a strong influence over her regarding decisions over her medication.

Jurors also heard how Xiao had led a similar workshop in Hurstville, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, in April 2015.

At that seminar, he described Paida Lajin as 100 per cent effective against Type 1 Diabetes, and that its healing effects meant it was no longer necessary to take insulin as it would be generated naturally.

Among those attending were the parents of a six-year-old boy called Aidan. At the workshop, Aidan’s parents stopped giving him insulin and he became extremely unwell, with symptoms of diabetic ketoacidosis.

Xiao told the parents that it was part of the ‘self-healing body adjustment’, but Aidan died as a direct consequence of not receiving his insulin.

Following Aidan’s death, Xiao was prosecuted for manslaughter in Australia and was convicted. The judge at that trial found that Xiao had given instructions to Aiden’s mother to stop injecting him with insulin, and that he had repeated this instruction a number of times during the workshop.

The CPS’s Extradition Unit was instrumental in Xiao being convicted both in England and Australia.

Initially, they represented Australia in the English extradition court process, which resulted in Xiao’s return to Australia, for prosecution.

He was then successfully extradited back to England in 2023 following further work between the CPS’s Extradition Unit and its Australian counterparts, so that he could be successfully prosecuted for the manslaughter of Mrs Carr-Gomm by the CPS Special Crime Division..

Mencap responds to the Mental Health Bill

Source: Mencap published on this website Thursday 7 November 2024 by Jill Powell

Jon Sparkes, OBE, Chief Executive of learning disability charity Mencap, said:
“This Bill can’t come soon enough for the 2,000 people with a learning disability and/or autism who are stuck in mental health hospitals right now, as well as those at risk of admission.
“Reforming the Act is key to ending inappropriate detention and placing new duties on commissioners to ensure the right community support is developed.
“We welcome the inclusion of reforms to stop people with a learning disability and autistic people being detained when they don’t have a mental health condition. The NHS’s own reviews have shown that over 40% of people trapped in mental health hospitals do not need to be there, yet they face an average of nearly five years locked away.
“The Bill must put in place strong duties to develop the right community support, including social care and suitable housing, which alongside the Bill’s other reforms could bring this scandal to an end.
“We will scrutinise the Bill to make sure it delivers the change we want and need to see for people with a learning disability.”

Mencap exists to ensure the UK is the best place in the world for people with a learning disability to live happy and healthy lives. Mencap support people directly and campaign with people with a learning disability, their families and carers. Mencap work to change laws, increase representation and campaign for better health, social care and employment opportunities for the 1.5 million people with a learning disability in the UK.