The clinical framework behind the training, the audit and the assessment — and the argument for why safeguarding needs it.
Online Harms is the issue;
cybertrauma is the impact.
Cybertrauma™ is any trauma that is a result of self or, other-directed interaction with, mediated through, or from any electronic internet/cyberspace ready device or machine learning or artificial intelligence algorithm, that results in impact now or future.
This event/interaction can be multi-modal, multi-platform and multi-interval, delayed or immediate, legal or not, singular or plural, and may include images, sound, and or text and may or may not be vitriolic in nature.
Events may include covert and overt typology and may be virtual and corporeal and/or at the same time.
(Knibbs, 2016–2021)
This is the definition the field uses. It was written to be precise enough to hold up in research and in policy — and everything below is built on it.
This one seems to have slipped under the net. A child tells someone what they watched online — and what happens in the next sixty seconds decides whether that child gets a trauma-informed response, and whether your organisation can show it acted.
Built by a clinical researcher — grounded in peer-reviewed research and in frontline clinical practice. These five pillars are what the assessment scores you against, what the audit measures, and what the training programme teaches.
We already track trauma exposure in first responders. Children watching the same violence online deserve the same clinical lens — the mind doesn't distinguish scene from screen.
Trauma-informed language, documentation standards and escalation pathways, so the response is immediate and grounded rather than frozen.
Cybertrauma integrated into the safeguarding categories and workflows you already run, using evidence-based triage criteria.
Training, policy and audit-ready evidence in place before an inspection or serious case review exposes the gap.
Grounded in doctoral research and two decades of clinical practice, so you can defend the approach to leadership and inspectors.
Most people who read this page can't authorise the budget themselves. This is the one-page version — the gap, the method, and what it costs to keep waiting — written to be forwarded to a board, a head, or a commissioner.
Download the one-page summaryThe free assessment scores your organisation against all five pillars in under five minutes.
Take the assessmentDoctoral research with children aged 7–10 who had viewed violence and gore online, using trauma-informed drawing-based methods — because direct questions about what a child saw can re-traumatise and still miss the truth.
The children in that study had already concluded that adults were not safe to tell. Not because the adults didn't care — because they didn't know what to do with it, and children can tell the difference. That finding is why this framework exists, and why it starts with what an adult says in the first thirty seconds.